


Overlord fic first drafts

by orphan_account



Category: Overlord - Maruyama Kugane & Related Fandoms
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, F/F, Fem!Ainz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:42:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25617529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A couple of first drafts of first chapters for a story I'm writing and thought worth sharing. Fem!Ainz
Relationships: Ainz Ooal Gown | Momonga/Albedo
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	1. Draft I Chapter 1

In the early 20__s, as VR technology grew rapidly in quality, a new type of game took the world by storm: full-dive VR MMOs, typically just called Dive-MMOs or DMMOs. By far the largest and most popular of these games at first was Yggdrasil. Twelve years before the present day, it had emerged as an open-world game overflowing with new places to explore and endless customization. Voice disping and direct nerve-input gear allowed a person to look and sound like virtually anything they wanted, and experience the world with every sense and in great detail. The game’s class system allowed players to create nearly infinitely many different builds, such that replicating another player’s build was nearly impossible unless you knew not only what their class combinations were but also what order they had taken those levels. 

It had helped to define the genre, so much so that the imagery of Yggdrasil was still what everyone in every advanced country on earth thought of when they heard DMMO. But its glory days were long passed now. 

Once upon a time, the great guild-halls of Nazarick had rung with laughter. They were quiet now. Of the forty-two comrades who had for ten years called this place home just two remained. 

They were seated next to each other in the great meeting room of Nazarick, a grand cathedral-like space where forty-two chairs encircled a great table. One of the figures seated was a tall, masculine figure with red skin and several pairs of horns sprouting from his hairless head. He wore the loose flowing clothes of a monk, though with even a passing glance one could see the great power woven into those robes, or held within the deceptively plain staff slung across the demonic creature’s back. The other figure was smaller, feminine, and pale blue, clad in the red and gold robes of a mage. She had only one small pair of horns curving back from among her mass of dark curly hair. 

The feminine figure spoke up. “How long has it been, Herohero? A year, two years?” There was an unmistakable tone of loneliness and wistfulness in her voice. 

“Longer, it feels like,” the large red demon, Herohero, replied. His English was accented by Japanese, though very lightly. 

“I wasn’t expecting you to come back, least of all now. It’s the last day, after all; Yggdrasil’s servers shut down tonight. Not much to come back for.” In just four hours, at midnight, the the once-mighty would be finally brought low forever. 

“A friend is always worth seeing, Cassandra.” 

Cassandra smiled. “How’s that new job treating you? You left the guild when you changed IRL jobs, if I recall.”

“Terribly, Cassie. Just terribly. Never should have taken it. I thought I was a busy salaryman before, but now…. How about you? Still teaching?”

“Still teaching,” Cassie confirmed. She taught chemistry and physics at a local high school. It had initially been a job of passion, but eventually had just become a way to pay bills. 

Herohero thought for a while before starting the conversation again. “It looks like you’ve taken good care of the base while you’ve been guildmaster.”

“Guildmaster, hah. Ainz Ooal Gown is just me now.” 

“Even so. It looks like everything is well-maintained. Nazarick’s well-guarded as ever, a fortress in its final hour.” 

This went back and forth for many hours. The two friends spent a long while catching up, complaining about their coworkers and bosses and students or subordinates, reminiscing over the guild’s most memorable exploits, about their other guildmates, and everything else that had tied them all together. 

Ainz Ooal Gown had been at its height several years ago the most feared and accomplished PVP guild in all of Yggdrasil. Though small, just forty-two members compared to the thousands that many other mighty guilds boasted, they were a tightly-integrated team whose members all knew the others’ abilities intimately. Every single member had been max-level. 

The guild had only had two requirements for joining: the first, that prospective members had to be productive and functional members of society; and the second, that they had to have a monstrous avatar. 

The first rule made sure that every player had to fight their IRL responsibilities for every moment they were playing the game, which meant that they valued their time greatly and were deeply focused and as present as possible while logged in. Ainz Ooal Gown had no interest in casual players. 

The second rule, that all members must play monstrous races, meant everyone in Ainz Ooal Gown was an outcast. There were three fundamental types of playable race in Yggdrasil: the humanoids, these being the humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, and so forth, essentially the standard “good” races of fantasy; the demihumans, such as goblins, orcs, and ogres, these being the human-ish races who exchanged some freedom in Yggdrasil’s major cities for modest stat boosts and special abilities; and finally the monstrous, officially Heteromorphic, races, who exchanged any assistance from NPC cities and towns for much larger boosts to their individual power. Playing monstrous races came with some considerable downsides, however, the most important being one was counted as an NPC member of whatever race they played as, and so for example a player who had a quest to kill slimes could PK slime players and have it count towards their quest goal. Heteromorphic players especially at low levels when one is very vulnerable were constant targets of humanoid and demihuman players. 

Heteromorphic players were individually stronger than human or demihuman players, and having so many max-level monstrous players working as a team had given Ainz Ooal Gown a great advantage when facing other guilds. 

There was eventually a comfortable lull in the conversation. The two demons were quiet for a time as they leaned back remembering the old days.

“Thank you, Cassie, for being here still. You’ve kept this place going so that we could return any time.” 

“Hey, that’s what a guildmaster does. It’s my job to go down with the ship, as it were.”

Herohero gave an infernal smile. “We all had so much fun while you were our leader, Cas. I hope when we meet again it’ll be in Yggdrasil II.” 

“I haven’t heard anything about a sequel just yet. That sounds wonderful though, being together again. I’d be happy to meet you again like that.”

“I’m looking forward to it! I’m already nodding off though, so I think I’ll log off soon here. It’s been really good, seeing you again.”

“Likewise, Hero” Cassana replied. “Goodnight. See you on the other side.”

Herohero’s ham-sized gauntleted fist made a few quick motions in the air, as if casting a spell, and he vanished. 

Cassie was alone. 

No one but Herohero had ever returned, even to visit. 

See you again. Let’s meet up. Let’s hang out sometime. She’d heard those words before. 

“Lies,” she muttered, her fists clenched. “Liars!” she shouted, standing up from her chair, and punched the table as hard as she could. 

Yggdrasil registered this as an attack, and after a moment calculated the damage as [0 (immune)]. 

“Liars!” she shouted again, her shoulders shaking. “It’s been fun!? See you again sometime!? This is the Great Tomb of Nazarick we built together! ‘It’s been fun.’ Is that all!?” 

Yet she knew in her heart that it really was just that. Every member of the guild had made the choice between fantasy and real life. Likely as not, everyone to make that choice found it painful. Cassie was the last to be forced to choose. 

But what was there tying her real self, Mackenzie Connolly, to her home in Canada? Just bills, and the job that paid them. She had no lover, no pets, no friends to speak of. Her only living family was back in Ireland in some tiny village in the middle of nowhere, and she hadn’t even seen them since she was five, almost thirty years ago. She didn’t even have a favourite bar. What was there for Mackenzie, but to stay on as Cassandra until the end?

As she sat stewing, her eyes began to wander to her left, towards a glass-panelled alcove. In that alcove was a golden staff, one that might at first glance be mistaken for a wall decoration, like so many other works of art that lined the walls of Nazarick’s lowest floors. 

But it was special for another reason than intricate design. There was nothing that represented Ainz Ooal Gown like that staff. It was a mighty weapon, custom designed like all Guild Weapons from scratch. For all their great power, most guilds kept their weapons secreted away, deep within the innermost sanctums of their treasuries, since the destruction of a Guild Weapon meant the immediate disbanding of the guild, which included losing control of the guild’s base and treasury, leaving both open to the world. But now, so empty was the world and so relaxed was Cassandra that the Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown was a wall decoration in the meeting room. 

Cassie had never touched it except to move it from one part of the Nazarick to another, despite the fact that it had been tailor-made to complement her abilities as a combat mage. Even now, in the last hours of the world, she hesitated to reach out and take it. 

The whole guild had spent their nearly every waking moment collecting rare materials and unique items to put together the staff. They’d taken sick days for extra time, fought with their spouses for more hours in the day, and worked for over a year all told to build it. There had been many arguments about the nature and appearance of the staff, but gradually it had taken shape, and in the end was a kerykeion or caduceus of gold and glittering gems, each of which could produce a variety of functions. 

In the quest to complete the staff they had run across many rare and powerful monsters and explored many new dungeons, including a place then simply called the Shadowy Tomb that would later become the Great Tomb of Nazarick. They had won the right to make it into their guild base after finishing it all in one go, and on their first try, an exceedingly rare occurrence in a game where detailed prior knowledge was usually the difference between victory or defeat. Such was the skill of Ainz Ooal Gown. After acquiring their fortress they had searched far across the nine worlds of Yggdrasil for new and interesting monsters to guard it. Though many had died in assaults on Nazarick by other guilds over the years, often dying irretrievably, many more yet remained. 

The Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown was a symbol of their past glories, a monument to Ozymandias, just like the silent shell Nazarick itself. 

After a few moments of reminiscing Cassie rose from her chair and reached out toward the glass of the display case. It parted for her like cold syrup, bending out of the way to make room for her arm and the staff that would follow the other way. When her hand curled around the gilded shaft an electric thrumming travelled up through her arm. With a shudder, she pulled the staff from the case and set adrift in the air above the meeting table, where its gems caught the light of the chandelier high above and scattered rainbows beaming all across the great hall. 

_Just two hours left, now,_ she thought. _Might as well carry it around. Nothing for it really._

Cassie waved her hand and the staff obediently sank down from where it floated to within her reach. She made an overdramatic motion as she took it, just because she could. 

The Guildmaster now finally carried the Guild Weapon, and so, in the twilight hours of Yggdrasil, at least that, if aught else, was as it should be. 

Cassie took a long walk through the quiet halls of Nazarick, touring the stores and guildmembers’ houses that lined the streets of the vast cavern that was the Ninth Floor. The guild had built the Tomb with an arcology in mind, and in this part had set up shops for just about every service one might find in an Yggdrasil city. There were barbershops, repair shops, magic item shops, ingredient and reagent shops, grocery stores, inns, a fishing tackle shop, a printing shop, a map shop, for maps in Yggdrasil had to be crafted or purchased by players, a flower and gifts shop, several restaurants, a magical mount stable, and even dummy shops for things that didn’t exist in Yggdrasil, such as a drab grey store with boarded windows labelled “Used Car Dealership, Closed Until Further Notice,” or a large boxy building with a blue box on the front labelled “Great Purchase Electronics'' in parody of Best Buy. A phalanx of NPC hoplites carrying spears with “Greek Squad” banners stood at attention out front as she passed. 

As she travelled through the mock town, she encountered several maids in blue dresses and white aprons. All were young and female and humanoid, and had the skin and features of a half a hundred ethnic groups, ranging from pale with blond hair and blue eyes to reddish-brown and dark-haired to coal-black skin and eyes on the other extreme. These were the Homunculus Maids, the forty-two NPC maids each designed by and for a particular member of Ainz Ooal Gown to serve their chambers directly. However, with nearly every player house but her own now defunct, Cassie had reorganised them into the stewards of the Ninth Floor as a whole. As she completed her long loop through the ‘town,’ she passed a final one and motioned to her attention. 

“Thank you for your service,” she said to the maid. 

The maid bowed, long brown hair almost touching the ground. “My Lady honours me,” she replied, before turning and returning to her business. Whichever of the players who had made her had given the tan girl a soft, sweet voice. 

The AIs that animated the NPCs of Nazarick were advanced as video game AIs went, intelligent enough to hold complex conversations and create surprisingly individual personalities from the relatively simple instructions their makers gave them, though humour that wasn’t pre-programmed dad jokes was mostly lost on them. They made for okay company, all things considered. 

At the end of the long looping lane through the Ninth Floor there was a grand marble staircase that led down towards the Tenth and penultimate floor of Nazarick, which consisted almost wholly of the Throne Room. The stairs were wide enough that ten people could walk down it side-by-side and with arms outstretched and not touch the walls. Plush red carpet softened the clop of Cassie’s demonic hooves on the marble as she descended. 

At the bottom of the stairs was the receiving room, a grand parlour with long benches along the sides and a dozen tables with golden tea sets and piles of cookies and pastries. Standing at the entrance to the receiving room was a tall, stately man with snowy white hair and a white, neatly trimmed beard that surrounded an old and deeply wrinkled face. He wore an old-fashioned black silk suit, with a black bow tie and white gloves. This NPC was Sebas Tian, the overall head of the serving staff, and he could not have been more distinguished if he’d had a monocle. Sebas was one of the 10 level 100 NPCs that guarded the Great Tomb of Nazarick. 

Behind him stood six maids, though they bore only a passing resemblance to the Homunculus Maids of the floor above. These were the Pleiades Battle Maids, and each was obviously armed and armoured, their maid uniforms themselves being divine-class items that offered tremendous defensive power. Each one was uniquely crafted, each specialised for particular skills that taken together made for a strong party. One was a tall blonde woman who was actually a slime, one was a tan, red-haired werewolf, one a school-teacher-looking dullahan with a choker around her neck to keep her head on, another an expressionless red-haired girl who carried a machine gun. 

They, along with Sebas, were the last line of defense in Nazarick, charged with holding the Ninth Floor to the last while the guild itself prepared for a last stand in the Throne Room, though chances of victory would be slim if any invaders managed to get that far. Since the Pleiades were each only level 75, they posed little challenge to level 100 players, especially in groups, but were optimised for high offense so as to do as much damage as possible and make invaders waste whatever resources they could before they faced the guild itself. 

Curious about them, since she had not paid close attention to them while her guildmates were developing them, Cassie went to the expressionless gunslinger and opened the developer tools, exercising that power as Guildmaster for the first time she could remember. The maid’s datasheet listed her as an automaton, with no name but rather a designation: CZ2128-Δ. There were detailed notes about her personality that Cassie skimmed. She and the other maids, she found, all had complex backstories and detailed personality descriptions. Descriptions that would all be lost to history very shortly. 

As she looked through the page, her 15-minutes-remaining timer went off. _Almost done now._ With a sigh, she closed the developer menu, and turned to the refined butler. “Sebas.”

“How may I serve you, Cassandra-sama?” He spoke English to her with the accent of a British aristocrat, yet added Japanese honorifics all the same. It was the kind of accent that could make anyone feel like they weren’t rich enough to talk out loud in earshot of someone who had it. 

“Accompany me into the throne room. And maids, you too.” A queen approaching her throne, especially for the last time, should have a retinue. 

All seven of them gave a synchronised bow and followed in a neat line behind her as she proceeded towards the throne room. The way there lay through a hallway on the other end of the parlour, a long passage by twenty-one Shadesteel Golems on either side, for a total of forty-two. These were not true monsters but constructs, magic items crafted by players, which could be activated to attack opponents coming down the halls. They had high offense and defense as well as spell immunity but lacked any special abilities beyond that and didn’t have the adaptive tactical thinking standard for powerful NPCs. They made an excellent roadblock on the road to the last stand, and allowed long-distance AOE spells to be hurled by the besieged guild from a position of safety. They were a sort of glossy metallic purple, carved to look like winged gargoyles and so intricately carved and detailed they seemed almost alive. Though invisible to the casual observer, the hall was also set with deadly traps every few feet to further hinder any invader’s progress. 

The doors of the Throne Room of Ainz Ooal Gown were fully thirty feet high. They were constructed not of wood or iron or any other mundane material, but rather of scarletite, the very hardest metal in all Yggdrasil, and was coated with enough radium paint that only high-level radiation protection spells allowed a person to approach without taking enormous damage and debilitating radiation sickness debuff, and even then not for very long. The radioactive paint would also fleck off into clouds and stick to anything nearby when the doors were rammed, damaging players and wrecking equipment. They were, of course, also the focus of thousands of defensive spells that had to be peeled back before they _could_ be attacked with a battering ram, which would also have to be made of scarletite in order to break them. 

Cassie, however, need not pass through the doors. As a member of the guild that owned this hall, she was freely able to cast teleport spells in and out of and all through the Great Tomb, and so instead of approaching the dangerous throne room doors she simply used a [Gate] spell that allowed her and her train of serving staff to walk through a portal directly to the throne itself. She waited until the last moment, when the great glowing doors and their horror-movie carvings were already looming over her, before pointing to a spot on the floor. There a small black bead expanded Terminator-style until it was a two-and-a-half-metre empty spot in the room. After a final mournful look at the doors, she walked through into the throne room. 

The Throne Room was the very grandest of grand halls in the Tomb. Modelled after a cathedral, it had a ceiling some fifty metres high, where forty-two huge banners hung down in two rows, each one painted with the personal sigil of a member of Ainz Ooal Gown. Between the two rows of banners hung a dozen gigantic chandeliers, each one the size of an elephant. The chamber had enough floor space to play half a dozen games of soccer at the same time, with a good crowd of spectators for each, and not feel full. 

The [Gate] opened up just a few metres from the throne, which was elaborately carved out of bones and twisted metal. It sat on an elevated platform that ran for a ways along the back wall of the chamber. It had a distinctly macabre presence to it, as it had been made Ulbert Ulain Odle to resemble the very seat of the devil himself, at least as he imagined it. Ainz Ooal Gown was an “evil” guild, one whose members roleplayed to some degree the monsters of their avatars, and by far the most enthusiastic roleplayer among them had been Ulbert. 

Beside the throne was a tall, elegant woman in a backless white dress. She had pale skin and long, smooth black hair, two white horns curling out from her temples, and a pair of black bird wings curling out from just above the crook of her back. This NPC was the High Guardian Albedo, the overseer of all the other Floor Guardians of Nazarick. As Cassandra approached the throne, Albedo bowed to her. 

The timer announced the five minute mark. 

Cassandra sat slowly and heavily on the throne, which, despite its twisted appearance turned out to be quite comfortable, for the first and last time. Albedo, along with Sebas and the maids who had followed her through the [Gate], all knelt before their queen as she took her place. Cassandra spent a long, sober moment taking in the sight. 

“Albedo?” she said, looking at the kneeling demon. She was a tall woman, at once graceful and elegant and tough and muscular. Like every female NPC in the keep, she was extraordinarily beautiful. She was also almost totally unfamiliar to Cassie, who had only rarely ever visited the Tenth Floor. 

“Yes, Cassandra-sama? How may I serve?” She too spoke with honorifics in a posh English accent. 

“Who made you?”

The demon raised her head to look at Cassie, revealing a broad smile and huge yellow cat-slitted eyes. “I was made by Tabula Smaragdina-sama, Cassandra-sama.” 

“Tabby, huh? I wonder….” Tabula Smaragdina’s favourite trope was something called gap moe, which if she recalled right was when there was a large change in a character’s overall personality when they were in different situations. If he had created Albedo, that almost certainly meant she had some secret side to her in her backstory. Cassandra opened up the developer pane again and took a look at Albedo’s information page. It turned out to go on and on and on for many pages, and was very dense, so she just skipped to the end so see if there was anything interesting. 

There was indeed something interesting. The very last line was written in plain kana: そして、アルベードはヤリマンです。(Soshite, Arubedo wa yariman desu. Also, Albedo is a slut.)

That was basically what Cassie had expected, but the bluntness and frankly thoughtlessness was still rather striking. _Tabby, after going to all the work of making an NPC and that’s all you’ve got?_ Cassie erased the last line, thought for moment, then input her own edits: そして、アルベードはレズとヌディストとヤリマンです。(Soshite, Arubedo wa rezu to nudisuto to yariman desu. Also, Albedo is a lesbian, a nudist, and a slut.) _That’s better. A girl after my own heart. Go big or go home, Tabby._

As she saved her changes and closed the window, her timer announced the very last minute before midnight. Cassie gave the hall and the NPCs before her a final look, drinking in every detail of the staff, the twisted throne, the patterns of the blue marble floor, the silver spiderweb patterns in Albedo’s white gown, until finally the final ten seconds of the game were upon her. 

She closed her eyes then, counting under her breath those last seconds. 

23:59:53.

23:59:54.

23:59:55.

5….

4….

3….

2….

1….

00:00:01.

00:00:02.

00:00:03. 

Wait, what? 

Cassie opened her eyes. There before her was the throne room, exactly as she had left it. 

Why hadn’t she been logged out? The game should have forcibly logged her out by now. She should be in a virtual environment of her console’s menu, not here. Was there some problem pulling the plug? Was the game’s end cancelled? Reasons kept spinning through her head, but nothing really led anywhere. If something had happened the GMs would have made a push announcement. 

Had they sent something she’d missed? Cassie opened the command console to check. Or tried to, at least. The simple motion of drawing one’s hand down was supposed to open the system menu, but the motion did nothing. There was no console. 

_What the fuck!? What the hell is going on?_

She tried opening the system menu several times more, again to no avail. She tried opening her in-game menu, and found her inventory and spell list were still there. _Did they update the interface one me? No, they force log-offs for updates and I was just using the system console a minute ago._

“[Call GM],” she said. The Game Moderator call function for reporting abusive behaviour or system problems worked like a spell, so it could be used more quickly than sorting through a menu. Nothing happened, however. There was no response, just the silence of the dungeon air. 

“[Call GM]!” she said again, her voice now shrill. 

Silence. She was shut out of the game’s meta. 

What could this even possibly be? Was there a second game they were repurposing the servers for, and she’d been caught up in it? That didn’t seem right. Intentional or no, keeping her here was cyber-kidnapping. There’s no way a company that’s already losing money would risk the exposure for that. 

As her confusion rapidly deepened and crept towards actual panic, Cassandra heard a voice. 

“Is there something wrong, Cassandra-sama?”

It was the voice of Albedo, who was still down on one knee and looking up at her. 

“Hm- what?” 

“Is there something wrong, Cassandra-sama? You look worried.” The demon’s porcelain-doll face wore a worried frown.

Cassandra was used to having conversations with the NPCs of Nazarick, but not once in all her ten years in Yggdrasil had an NPC ever asked what was wrong, or even acknowledged when players behaved strangely. Her brain, already filled past its limit, could not keep up with this new development. “Um, I…”

“Are you alright?” Albedo asked. Her face had a warm, motherly quality to it. 

_That’s right. Don’t panic; focus; keep moving. That’s what Punitto Moe always said when we got into real trouble._ “I’m, ah, I’m o-okay, yes, Albedo,” she said, stumbling over her words. 

As she struggled to get her mind back on track, a strong scent found its way to nostrils. It was the unmistakable smell of sweat and perfume. It was much more powerful and demanding of attention than anything Yggdrasil’s inputs threw at her, and it had a soothing, grounding effect, cutting through her tired mind’s noise. Without needing to look, she knew it was Albedo’s scent. 

“Is something the matter then, o Supreme One?” 

“Y- yes. The [Call GM] function isn’t working.” 

“‘[Call GM]?’ Forgive me Cassandra-sama. I’m afraid I don’t understand. What is [Call GM]?” 

“It’s a type of messaging spell. I’ll explain later.” Her brain now clear, she decided to focus on gathering information. Cassie thought of another approach. Though the [Shout] command for calling GMs wasn’t working, that wasn’t the only way to find a moderator. Many were themselves players, and the [Message] spell, designed to contact other players, would allow one to find the nearest in-game moderator. “[Message: Moderator],” she said. Nothing. The spell worked, at least, creating the familiar floating geometric symbols and draining a few points of mana, but no moderator responded. 

What the hell? Cassie felt a deep-seated unease in her gut, almost like her intestines were being wrung out like a cloth. She was trapped, stuck, unable to logout, unable to even ask for help. What now, then? _Punitto would say.... Focus on your surroundings. Yes, that’s it. I’ll make sure this is actually Yggdrasil, and then work from there._

Cassie punched the throne, as she had the table earlier that night. The normal [0 (immune)] did not appear where she hit. _Okay. Good to know. Damage no longer visible, at least not to objects._ With her other hand she released the Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown. Just like earlier, letting it go made it float wherever dropped. The basics, at least, still seemed to be in order.

The next was examining the NPCs. Albedo had already exhibited strange behaviour, and Cassie wanted to know if they were still limited by game rules. “Sebas! Maids of the Pleiades! Approach the throne.” 

The seven of them all rose in unison, took two steps forward, and formed a line where they stood at attention. 

“Sebas. Take the maids, go to the surface, and make sure everything is alright. If you see any creatures, do not engage in any hostile actions unless they act first. Move in pairs or trios, do not go alone. Stray no further than one kilometre from the tomb’s entrance. Report back in an hour.” 

“Understood, Cassandra-sama!” they all said in unison. The seven servants gave a bow before turning and leaving at a run. Custom guild base defense NPCs could not leave the base under any circumstances and would protest if you tried to order them to leave. It seemed that rule was now overturned. 

As the servants departed the room, Albedo spoke again. “Cassandra-sama! Forgive my presumption, but what’s going on, that you would send the mighty Sebas to the surface?” 

That was new too; no NPC had ever questioned orders given to other NPCs, or indeed questioned any order except to clarify vague directions. Apparently they had just received some kind of realism upgrade. 

The rules, it seemed, were different, not different enough to not be Yggdrasil at all but clearly different enough not to be the Yggdrasil she knew. Maybe Herohero had been right about Yggdrasil II. That still didn’t explain why there was no command interface, however, since a new game would need one more than ever. 

“I don’t know what’s going on, Albedo. That’s making me nervous is all.” 

“Do you have any orders for me, o Supreme One?” The demon’s huge cat eyes looked at her imploringly.

_What? That’s new too._ “Um, no. Not right now. Stand by, be ready, I suppose.” 

Albedo did exactly that, turning around to look at the throne room and keep an eye out. 

_A realism upgrade.... That might have other effects too_. If the NPCs had more detailed minds, creatures might now have more detailed bodies. Cassie gave her own blue skin a cursory look and feel, and indeed, her skin and clothes were dramatically more detailed than they had been just minutes ago. She had body heat and a pulse, and there was fine peach-fuzz hair all over her body where once it had just been smooth. Her fingerprints, just graphic textures before, were now three-dimensional. She even had nipples, the shapes of which were clearly visible through her robe. 

_Wait, Yggdrasil has always kept it PG-13 or less. No R-18 ever. Female nipples aren’t supposed to exist here._ Nevertheless, they existed now, and after feeling around a little further she found that so did several other less-than-PG body parts. _Is this some kind of eroge? Did Yggdrasil get bought out by someone making an H-MMO? No, Japan wouldn’t allow such a thing. America or Canada maybe, but not Japan._

There was at least one more way of testing. R-18 interactions with either players or NPCs both could get you banned for a long time, even permabanned. What if she were to force one? “Albedo, come here.” 

Albedo took a couple of steps in her direction. “Yes, Cassandra-sama? What will you have of me?” 

“Closer.” Albedo advanced until she was near enough to touch the throne. “Give me your hand.” 

Albedo reached out her hand, and Cassie took in her own. She examined the demon’s immaculate skin and found that it was now just like hers a hyperrealistic mixture of rough and smooth. Like Cassie, she also now had both heat and a pulse. 

And her smell was driving Cassie to distraction. This avatar’s nose was dramatically more powerful than it had been minutes ago, and she suspected even stronger than real life. The few times she’d gotten intimate with real girls, their scents hadn’t been anywhere near so powerful. 

As she felt Albedo’s wrist, the demon let out a muffled whimpering noise. It was quite unmistakably a noise of arousal, and when Cassie looked up to her she saw that Albedo was blushing faintly. Her eyes were heavily lidded, and she had the tips of the first two fingers of her other hand in her mouth. That was definitely new. No NPC had ever been aroused that Cassie could tell.

_Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what a sight._

She waited with Albedo’s hand in hers for a couple of minutes while the demon sent her flirtatious looks. No GM message appeared announcing her permaban. _Time to go further, perhaps?_ A tiny, weak voice in the back of Cassie’s head told her that would be sexual harassment. She barely heard it. 

Gingerly, she tugged on Albedo’s wrist, pulling her even closer. “I’m going to touch you now, Albedo,” she said. 

Albedo looked at her with her hooded eyes and nodded slowly in acknowledgement. 

“May I touch your breasts?” 

Albedo nodded again, this time more vigorously, and puffed out her chest towards Cassandra. Her breasts were quite generous, well larger than Cassandra’s avatar’s, and stood up on their own rather nicely. Her nipples, now stiff, showed through her dress. Cassie felt her face burn at the sight but didn’t know if it was visible on her blue skin. 

With one final moment of hesitation as she waited for the temporary ban message, Cassandra brought her hand up to Albedo’s breasts and gently cupped one, prompting Albedo to stifle another groan. Her breast was soft but firm, of almost supernaturally ideal consistency. Cassandra massaged it gently for a long, timeless moment as Albedo whimpered at the touch. Still no GM message, still no forced logout. Now emboldened, she reached over to the side of Albedo’s backless dress and tugged at it, slowly drawing it across the demon’s chest until her breast popped out with a comical jiggle. Pale blue veins were visible under her porcelain skin, surrounding a nipple so dark as to be almost black, stark against the surrounding white. Cassie cupped Albedo’s bare breast in her hand, massaging it more and brushing across her nipple. Albedo was no longer trying to quiet her hitched breathing, and her once-light flush now coloured her entire face and neck beat-red. 

“Does my Mistress intend to take me now?” Albedo asked. “Will I have my first time here?”

The question took some time making its way into Cassie’s now lust-fogged brain, but when it did, it jolted her back to reality. “Oh! Um, no, not now. That’s, uh, all for now.” _What the hell was that? Why did I go that far.... Well, decent clue anyway. Whatever’s going on, certainly nobody’s worried about getting shut down by Japan’s government._

“Why? Am I not not pleasing enough for my Mistress? Is there something I must do first?”

“What? No, now’s just, ah, not the time for that.” 

“Oh. I understand. Forgive me! I let my desires overtake the urgency of the situation,” Albedo said, hastily shoved her breast back into her dress. 

“No, no, it was me who let my emotions get in the way. I shouldn’t lead you on like that…” _So what’s the next step? I’ve confirmed this isn’t Yggdrasil as I knew it. It’s much more realistic, and allows for sexual content. The NPCs are more intelligent too. So that leaves, what, other game mechanics? Well, at least there’s a very good place to test that._ “I have proper orders for you now. Go and find Demiurge, Cocytus, and Shalltear, and bring them to the Colosseum on the Sixth Floor in an hour. I will be holding a meeting of all the guardians there, and that includes you. Tell them to be on high alert until then. You keep an eye out, too, and make sure to tell me if anything is even the least bit out of place.” 

“I will gather the guardians of the Third, Fifth, and Sixth floors, and bring them to the Colosseum in an hour, got it.”

“Yes. Now go!” 

Albedo nodded and vanished without a trace. 

_Huh. Okay. The teleportation animation is gone. Good to know._

_So, in all, I’m trapped in a new hyper-realistic H-MMO and have no way to contact the outside world. Excellent. Just fucking great. I’ve got work tomorrow, too.... Oh, and I’ve molested Tabby’s creation. And she liked it. Even better._

  
  
  
  



	2. Draft I Chapter 2

When Cassandra sat up, she was nearly pulled back down into the throne by an unfamiliar sensation of weight. 

_My tail,_ she thought, looking backwards. _It’s heavy now. It didn’t have any weight before._

One of the major selling points of DMMOs was that they allowed inputs into the brain that the human nervous system did not, such as senses or body parts humans didn’t have. Cassie’s blue Lesser Demon avatar was about two metres tall and had hooves and a long prehensile tail that acted like a third arm, and while she played Yggdrasil her brain adapted so well to having that body that Cassie felt weird and wrong for sometimes hours after leaving the game. She’d dropped her phone and drinks and many other things in midair when her brain told her that it had a tail to use but her real body didn’t. 

But the tail had been effectively weightless when she sat down a few minutes ago. Yggdrasil avoided making any too-drastic changes to a player’s balance, but whatever this new system was, it added realistic weight to her new body. 

She realised that was true of her chest as well, once she’d taken a few steps to get her balance. Her avatar’s breasts were much larger than they were on her real body. She tried jumping experimentally a few times, and found that at the very least it didn’t hurt when they bounced no matter how hard she jumped. _No pain’s nice, at least. I wonder if this new game has bras? I’m not sure I want to be bouncing all the time. If this is an H-Game, though, it probably doesn’t. Maybe lingerie, but not pure support. Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s not painful? I guess we’ll see, at any rate; it’s not as I’m going anywhere soon._

 _Not going anywhere soon. I’ve just been kidnapped! I may as well be stuffed in a trunk with binds, a gag, and a blindfold. Why am I not panicking more? I can barely handle being startled!_ In fact, every time she thought about how frightening this was, her fear response rose and fell away rapidly as if being suppressed by something. 

Cassandra stepped forward onto the red carpet of the throne room where spent the next several minutes running back and forth and moving her tail around to get a sense of how to use it properly. She was already used to using it without weight, so it didn’t take long to get the hang of it. Once satisfied she could move without any significant balance issues, she retrieved the staff from where it floated by the throne then muttered the words “[Greater Teleport: Sixth Floor Arena]. 

After a brief moment of darkness accompanied by the uncomfortable sensation of being squeezed bodily through a rubber tube, Cassandra found herself under the gaze of a blazing tropical sun, walking through the sand that coated the floor of a huge Roman-style Colosseum. She couldn’t feel the heat of the sand on her hooves, but she could see and pick up individual grains with her hands, something that Yggdrasil didn’t allow, animating sand instead as a yellow-brown fluid or a spongy textured surface. 

The arena area itself was large, a hundred metres across at least, surrounded by vertically-stacked rows of marble seats that rose several stories above the sand, allowing probably a few thousand spectators. The sand was dotted every here or there with dark patches that resembled blood. As far as she could see, there wasn’t much else by way of detail. The air, however, was rich with smells, especially water and dirt and the myriad smells of plant life. It was the smell of jungle. 

The Colosseum’s seats were empty, for the spectators were meant to be members of Ainz Ooal Gown in the well-defended VIP box, and the main show the plight of invaders as they fought against the beasts of this jungle and against the guardians of this floor. 

_Speaking of which, where are the Guardians? They were a pair of dark elf siblings, if I recall.... Now what were their names again? Oreo and Mario? No, that’s_ definitely _not it. Aurora and Martin, maybe? That doesn’t sound right. Ayame and Miyuki? No, that’s not right either...._

As she thought on them, trying to remember their names, she heard something behind her. Turning, she saw a small figure in the VIP box waving at her. “Helloooooooo~!” it yelled, it’s voice muted by distance. The small figure then jumped out of the box, somersaulting almost ten feet straight upwards then falling forward almost six stories and landing on its feet like an expert acrobat.

It was a small figure, person-shaped but clearly not very large, child-sized at most. However, before Cassie could get a look at it, the small figure expanded rapidly, growing long, muscular legs, a long, muscular, reptilian head and neck, a long, stiff tail, and colourful feathers. _A velociraptor? Good style, I like it. That shapeshifting was a druid power right? I didn’t see any spellcasting. I think I remember something about the Guardians of being druids, so that’s probably one of them._ The dinosaur bounded forward with the acceleration of a sports car, covering the fifty or so metres between the edge of the arena and Cassandra’s current position in just a few seconds. Just a few feet before colliding with her, the dinosaur skidded to a dust-clouded halt and began to shrink back into the figure from before. 

The figure was in fact a child, a cute, androgynous-looking dark elf girl of about eleven. She had dark blue skin, the colour of the night sky, and a messy mop of pale white hair that when brushed might have reached her shoulders. From the sides of her hair poked two long ears. She had a gap-toothed smile that extended not unlike Albedo’s almost all the way across her broad face. Huge mismatched eyes, one green and one red, looked at Cassandra with the eagerness of a puppy. 

The child was dressed in a matador’s outfit, though one made from cloth-of-scarletite and trimmed and decorated with Gold Dragon scales. At her waist was a simple-looking but undoubtedly very powerful black leather whip, and a similarly plain wooden shortbow and quiver hung at her back. 

This child was one of the Guardians of the Sixth Floor of the Great Tomb of Nazarick. She was a level 100 Elite NPC, much like Albedo and Sebas, one of the nine such custom NPCs that Ainz Ooal Gown had designed to guard their keep.

Seen up close, she had all the same incredibly rich detail as Albedo, with even the individual threads of her clothes or the strands of her hair clearly visible. 

“Hiya!” the girl said, closing one eye and putting up two fingers in a ‘v for victory’ sign. 

_Aura! That was it. I should ask though; better to ask than assume._ “Hello. Aura, is it?”

“That’s right! Aura Bella Fiora, at your service, Cassandra-sama! Welcome to the floor I guard!” The small elf bowed deeply and theatrically, with one arm extended backwards like a performer. 

_Still in English, with honorifics. Well, I set them that way once I was the only one around. Does this new game still support Japanese?_ “Watashi ga wakarimasu ka?” she asked plainly, changing languages. Can you understand me?

“Hai, wakarimasu, Kassandora-sama,” Aura replied. Yes, I understand. 

_Good to know._ Cassie switched back to English. “Aura-san, I’ll be intruding here for a while.” 

“Oh no, you couldn’t intrude! You’re the Mistress of Nazarick, the Supreme Overlord, there’s no place in this Tomb you’d be intruding if you were to visit.” 

There was an almost panicked reverence to Aura’s voice, and it caught Cassandra off-guard. _Is she afraid of me? That’s another new thing. Guild NPCs have never shown fear without fear effects in place._ “Oh, by the way, where’s your brother? Mare, right?” 

Aura blinked in surprise, then turned around and bellowed, “Maaareeee-chan~! The great Cassandra-sama has graced us with her presence! How rude are you going to be, huh?” 

There was some slight movement in the shade of the VIP box, but no audible response. 

“Ah. So he was up there too?” 

“Yeah, um, he’s just really timid, he’s not trying to insult you or anything….” Aura’s shoulders tightened together, and her puppy-dog eyes away from Cassandra as if she were holding a rolled-up newspaper. 

_She really is afraid of me. Frankly that’s a first. Being five-two and ninety-five pounds doesn’t exactly lend itself to intimidation._ “It’s alright Aura-san,” she said, using her polite teacher tone to assuage her fear. “I never doubted you or him at all. I was just curious, you’re not in any trouble. Even so, I would like to speak to him. [Message: Mare].” _Will that spell work on NPCs? It didn’t before, but it seems like it could now._ Sure enough, she heard the soft hiss of white noise as the spell made its connection. “Mare-kun?” she said, experimentally. As usual, no actual sound came out of her mouth, it all being directed into the spell. 

There was a long pause before she got a response. “Y- yes, C- Cassandra-s- sama?” said a thin, shaky voice. 

“Mare-kun, I would like to speak with you. Don’t worry; I’m not angry at you, and you’re not in trouble. Is that all right?” 

There was another long pause before he responded. “Uh- um, alright. I’ll t- take the stairs….” and with another hiss of white noise the [Message] spell disconnected. Some thirty seconds later Cassandra saw movement on the stairs leading up to the VIP box, where a second small figure emerged and began jogging quickly over to Aura and Cassie. 

“M- M- Mare Bello Fiore, a- at your s- service,” he said, cowering as if still expecting a reprimand. “I’m s- sorry I kept you waiting, Cassandra-sama.” Mare Bello Fiore was, in many respects, almost identical to his sister. He had the same coloration, though his eyes’ mismatched colours were on different sides, and his hair was kept longer than Aura’s and cut into bangs over his forehead. His outfit too was not a matador’s but rather a schoolgirl’s, though made of the same cloth-of-scarletite and dragonscale. He was, otherwise, the complete opposite. Where Aura had carried herself confidently and brazenly, Mare was shaking anxiously and trying to squeeze his stance as tightly inward as he could, as if the very air was dangerous and out to get him.

“It’s no problem, really,” Cassie replied. “As I said, you’re not in any trouble for being nervous.”

That didn’t stop Aura from pinching his ear. “Don’t be rude to the Supreme Beings!”

“Ow! Nee-san, that hurt!”

“Yeah, and it’s gonna keep hurting if you don’t show up right away next time!” 

The two of them bickered back and forth for a couple of minutes, interacting in ways no Yggdrasil NPC had ever had the encoded intelligence to display. Frankly, they were for all the world acting like real people. _They would clearly pass even the most stringent Turing test. These must be the Aura and Mare Bukubukuchagama wanted to see, so lively and dynamic,_ Cassandra thought, remembering her old guildmate. 

“It’s good to see you two in such high spirits,” she said, once they were finished. 

The fight had ultimately ended with Mare pinned under a victorious Aura, who got up off her brother to reply. “Oh yeah, I’m positively overflowing with energy!” she said. “Be nice if we had an intruder or two, that’d shake things up.”

“M- maybe n- not intruders, they’re scary,” Mare said quietly. 

At Mare’s words, Aura’s easy expression darkened. “Cassandra-sama, would you give us a moment? Mare, come with me.” She grabbed her brother by the ear, dragging him about fifty feet away where she could yell at him without overly disturbing her Mistress. 

_Good grief,_ Cassandra thought. _These are definitely Bukubukuchagama’s children. She always said that brothers should listen to their older sisters.... I wonder if I should stop this? I know they’re NPCs, but this is still really uncomfortable to watch._

After a minute or two of merciless scolding, Aura seemed satisfied, and returned to Cassandra, followed distantly by Mare. “Don’t worry, I don’t think he’ll be late next time, Cassandra-sama,” she said. The look of the frightened puppy was back in her eyes. 

“No matter. Anyhow, you said something about boredom, Aura-san?” 

“Yeah. Nobody here can spar with me for more than about thirty seconds.”

“Not even Mare-kun?”

Aura looked back at Mare, who was shaking in place about twenty feet back and avoiding eye contact, then gave Cassandra a narrow-eyed expression that seemed to say, ‘ _seriously?_ ’, then just shrugged.

“Well, in any case, I told you that I intend to intrude for a while. I am here for training.” 

Aura’s eyes went wide. “The great Cassandra-sama, train?”

“Indeed. All mastery needs a solid foundation, after all; you can’t focus all the time on just the highest level of an art, otherwise you forget the other parts. Oh, and there is one more thing. I have called a meeting of all the Guardians of this Tomb; they will be here in about forty-five minutes.”

Aura’s look of wonder turned sour. “All of them? Even _Shalltear_?”

“All the Guardians, Aura-san.” _What does she have against Shalltear? Wait, who made Shalltear? Was it Pereroncino? If Bukubukuchagama’s little brother made her, that would explain it; they’d be natural rivals just like their creators. Ah, Pero and Buku and their bickering! That brings me back. I haven’t heard from those two in forever._

The little elf gave a dramatic harumph. “Then we should get this place ready for them! It’s kinda dull right now. Should I bring in-” 

“No need, Aura-san. Just stick around until then. And, if you would, bring out some training dummies.” 

Ten minutes later, Aura’s serving beasts had carried about a hundred wooden training dummies with straw bags on top and spread them out neatly and evenly across the arena. Cassandra took the lull to check to see if her inventory and spell list had been tampered with or indeed if anything else had gone missing when the game had changed. 

The in-game menu opened as normal when she held out a finger and drew it downward, but rather than being a transparent holographic screen superimposed on her visual field, the new menu opened directly into her mind in the same there-but-not-there way memories and imagined images formed in the mind. _Wow. Advanced. I wonder how that works?_ The layout was the same, though the colour palette was more muted. Her hitpoint and mana totals were there at the bottom of the image, same as ever, with the [Display In Environment: Y/N] slider set to [N]. Cassie went ahead and set it to [Y], just in case, since she’d only turned it off due to a lack of combat in the last few years. Her spell list, as well as her [Skills and Attributes] and [Equipment] tabs, were all unchanged, and when she dropped the menu to open her inventory she found that like usual she could access the familiar extra-dimensional space by pantomiming opening a curtain. 

_Alright. All in order then; time to test out some spells, make sure there aren’t any major surprises._ Having used [Message] and her [Greater Teleport] Spell-Like Ability, she already knew that spells with a casting time of (instantaneous) acted like they always had, with no visuals and simple immediate effects. She chose instead a spell with a casting time of (standard), meaning 0.9 seconds. “[Fireball]” she said, pointing at the nearest dummy. 

The casting animation was much to her surprise totally different from Yggdrasil’s standard circle of runes. Instead, at a point in front of her hand, a small point of faint reddish-orange light expanded into a transparent sphere that encompassed her hand and wrist, where it produced a cold tingling. Inside was a strange squiggly design like a bowl of red pasta in zero gravity which expanded inside until it touched the edges of the sphere. The strange sphere then collapsed back on itself and disappeared, at which point the dummy was engulfed in a cloud of flames. The whole process, just nine-tenths of a second start to finish, was too quick to properly follow. Strangely too, she could actually _feel_ mana flowing out from her hand, like wind under her skin. 

Cassie ignored the heat of the flaming dummy to stare at her hand. _What was that? I need to see more._ She then chose another spell with a longer casting time. “[Black Hole]!” This was tenth-level spell, the second-highest level of spell, and had a six-second casting time that would allow her to examine this fascinating new animation in more detail. The red bubble this time was much larger and much fainter, so large in fact that it entirely encompassed Cassie’s body, though it didn’t obscure her vision. From the same point in front of her hand as before a shoelace-like thread began to 3-d etch-a-sketch its way though the air. As it did, parts of it started coiling themselves into all sorts of fascinating shapes, from spring-like coils to tangled cats’ cradles and even places that looked like bits of woven fabric. Cassandra stared entranced as the coils and loops and weaves began to pile together into larger and more complex forms, from flat sheets to areas that looked like clouds of chains to strange geometric figures like hexagons made of tiny spheres roped together with DNA strands and many more she simply had no time process. _It’s like a protein!_ she thought. _The long chains, the complex folding, it’s just like a protein or enzyme. Now that’s just too cool. Props to whoever designed this._ As quickly as it came, the glowing protein-like animation collapsed back down into itself and vanished. The main event of the spell then began. 

In the air above a dummy about forty feet away, a small black orb some eight inches across took shape, and immediately the air around it was distorted into a whirlwind. Sand from the arena was rapidly collected by the maelstrom and began forming a disk shape around the small orb. Within just a second or two the disk shape was a glowing-hot full-blown accretion disk of swirling dust, creating a mighty screaming roar as the dust and sand spiralled into the tiny even horizon. The effect then spread out, the spinning cloud becoming a veritable tornado of heated sand, which around the centre was white-hot and right above the horizon a blindingly-bright plasma of silicon, oxygen, and nitrogen. The hapless dummy was drawn into the cloud, shredded, and then incinerated before finally being sucked into the black hole and completely annihilated. 

Mechanically speaking [Black Hole] was a spell effect with a radius of about sixty feet, which had four distinct layers at different radii inside: the first and outermost was a field of physical damage, the crushing, piercing, and slashing damage of sand and rocks and dust screaming by, which also obscured vision; the second from the edge was similar but more intense, and dealt fire damage besides as within that radius the dust was heated by its own friction; the third, and area of even more intense damage, but one that could deflect the paths of spells or missiles that passed into or through it depending on the angle of approach; and the fourth and final region, the area within five feet of the event horizon, caused the unlucky soul that wandered into it make a Reflex Save against being pulled into the black hole and annihilated completely or escaping into the third region, and could not just deflect spells and missiles but make them stronger or faster and send them back to the caster or just absorb them completely. The black hole could also be moved in accordance to the caster’s wishes, moving faster than a person on foot can run. It was a staple of max-level combat and served as a potent battlefield-control spell, since even one could effectively lock down small armies of monsters or players, both for its effects as a magic shield and also as a visual obscurant, and since the caster could produce up to four black holes at the same time without recasting the spell.

Standing just forty feet away, Cassie was inside the maelstrom’s outermost region, before the dust became hot, and found herself lashed as it raced by her. It hurt, stinging like being whipped. She was not there by accident, however: this was part of her experiment, to test whether her special abilities still worked as she remembered. One of her most important special powers was Regeneration (Relic and Good), which meant that damage dealt by anything less than 9th-level spells and relic-quality weapons with a [Good] alignment did non-lethal damage to her and that that damage healed at a steady rate per second. Non-lethal damage was a separate type from the normal, and instead of dying when she took so much, she could instead receive her entire hitpoint pool’s worth of non-lethal damage and then be no more than rendered unconscious until any damage that went over that total was recovered. It also served as [Fast Healing], recovering lethal damage at a fixed steady rate, though more slowly than the non-lethal. It was a vital part of surviving most encounters for her, since it lessened the need for combat healing that she couldn’t readily do herself without potions or other items and thus mostly freed her from the distraction such things entailed. In high-level PVP, where most people were expected to have divine-class items, the highest tier a player could craft, as their primary weapons, and cast spells of higher than sixth level, it mainly just served fast healing to help her survive being a caster with half or fewer the hitpoints of a martial-classed player of her level. Most heteromorphic races had some kind of HP recovery ability at high levels, and Regeneration was the standard for Celestial or Demonic creatures. 

As she expected she took lethal damage from the black hole, as it was a tenth-level spell, and her health recovered at the normal [Fast Healing] rate when she moved outside the radius. She then cut her thumb with a common-rarity magic knife of the type that one left in one’s inventory and forgot about for years, and saw the wound, which was much less painful that those from her spell, simply close up instantly. Sure enough, a second health bar above her original with a slightly different colour, indicating that she had taken some non-lethal damage. 

Satisfied with the experiment, Cassie then took a long moment to watch the black hole spell as it raged loudly in front of her. The general cloud, like most other parts of this game so far had been, was far more detailed and realistic than Yggdrasil’s equivalents, though the same in broad outline. The noise too was much louder; it had originally been a mere low rumble, like a washing machine heard through a wall, but was now something like a hurricane, a vacuum cleaner, and a banshee’s howl all in one. When she released the spell, the cloud of superheated dust in fact remained a cloud of superheated dust and air and sand and flung out the lava and plasma at high speeds in every direction, showering the arena with glowing debris and setting a could of nearby dummies on fire. 

_Beautiful,_ Cassie thought. _The mechanics of this new game are basically the same as Yggdrasil’s, but with far more realistic special effects._

The twins, standing nearby, stared at the spell’s results with looks of fascination and curiosity. Aura had a look of a dog watching other people play with a ball, and even Mare seemed to be more interested than afraid for the first time since he’d appeared. _Don’t worry, you two. I’ll make sure you have your fun as well. Just a few more things first...._

Just to make absolutely sure that the differences between this game and Yggdrasil were truly only cosmetic, Cassie experimented with her other Special Qualities and Spell-Like abilities. Most of these were racial features. All demi-human and monstrous races in Yggdrasil had one or many innate racial classes they could take levels of in place of ordinary job classes like Wizard or Cleric. As with all classes, racial classes had 20 total levels, but couldn’t be taken all in one straight go like job classes as each level of every racial class had different prerequisites, and because of the frustrating and sometimes disappointing ways they interacted with other class skills they were often neglected by players of races for whom they were available. Cassandra, like many members of Ainz Ooal Gown, had put in the effort to max out her primary racial class, since a Lesser Demon’s bonuses to spellcasting actually went a long way towards making her master-generalist mage build more effective, and also gave her some potent powerups independent of that, Regeneration among them. 

From 20 levels of Lesser Demon, she had the following traits: Immunity to acid, cold, negative energy, non-magical physical damage and poison, fear, paralysis and petrification effects, exhaustion, hunger and thirst effects, and disease; Resistance (½) to electricity, fire, and sub-relic-rarity magical weapon damage; Spell Resistance; Spell Immunity VI; Poison Resistance IX; Regeneration VI (Divine and Good); Unholy Aura V; and Change Shape (Humanoid). In addition, she gained the following Spell-Like Abilities: At Will - Greater Dispel Magic, Greater Teleportation, Animate Objects, Dimensional Anchor, Greater Invisibility (Self-Only), Summon Monster VII (Fiendish), Blasphemy, Mass Inflict Wounds III, Power Word: Stun, Continual Light, Darkness, Dancing Weapon, Message and Sublime Image; 3/day - Earthquake, Blade Barrier, Telekinesis, Mass Hold Monster, Mass Command Monster, Firestorm, Greater Explosion, Permanency, and Limited Wish; 1/day Power Word: Curse, Power Word: Kill, and Wish (Listed Effects Only). Cassie spent most of a half hour testing out these abilities as well as spells and found that they all worked more or less as she remembered. 

Then, finally, there was one last test: magic items. For this, she had decided to put the Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown to its first ever use. “Aura?” she said, turning away from the shattered remains of a dummy. “How would you like to have some fun now?” 

The girl’s large eyes lit up with hunger. “Yes, Cassandra-sama!” 

Cassandra took a long look at the staff, admiring its craftsmanship, then pointed it at a spot about a hundred feet off and spoke a command word. One of the gems of the staff lit up, glowing with the sickly purple of a blacklight, and in a broad triangle formation three similarly-coloured orbs expanded into existence. They quickly gathered around them swirling clouds of debris not unlike the black hole’s accretion disk, in ever-shifting clouds of steam, mud, rock, lava, ice, and dust each twenty feet across. The blacklight-like orbs didn’t change visually once embedded in clouds of material, but somehow any observer would know instantly that those orbs were eyes, eyes full of power and malevolence. 

“What’s that?” Aura asked uneasily. 

“That, Aura-san, is your new plaything. It’s called a Primal Chaos Elemental.”

According to the lore of Yggdrasil, the raw energy of creation that came before the gods crafted the universe had created these creatures, which were the mightiest of elemental spirits. The gods fought them in a million-year struggle to keep them from consuming the delicate creations that were the Nine Realms of Yggdrasil. Eventually, they had been encased deep within the planets themselves, where their rage kept the cores of the planets hot and made of lava. They were level 95 monsters, among the strongest non-unique creatures in the whole game, and their laundry list of powerful abilities and immunities helped to make them formidable enemies to anyone. 

Except, of course, to two 100th-level boss monsters like Aura and Mare. 

Aura’s expression turned to an unsettlingly predatory smile. “I can kill that?” 

Cassandra smiled wordlessly and held out her hand in a gesture of ‘ _be my guest_.’

Aura then began to change her stance, moving her feet apart and rocking from side to side to loosen up, much like a cat getting ready to pounce. 

Mare, however, was wide-eyed with fear, and was slowly backing away to avoid the confrontation. “I- I just suddenly remembered I have to- I have- I have something urgent to do,” he squeaked meekly. 

Aura, however, was having none of that, and before he could get more than a couple of steps she grabbed him by the forearm and dragged him off into the fray. Mare looked back at Cassandra in a desperate appeal for escape, but she just smiled at him.

“ _Ganbarimasu, Mare-kun_.” Do your best, Mare. 

While the two elves engaged in their one-sided battle, Cassandra made a quick mental checklist of what she had investigated, and what other areas she would need to look into. She’d covered the basics of the game’s mechanics, and was now reasonably satisfied that this new game basically functioned like Yggdrasil if Yggdrasil had far more computing power and greater attention to detail, that it was not mass-market in Japan as it allowed R-18, that its NPCs were intelligent and capable of dynamic interactions as well as no longer being bound by arbitrary rules about where they could travel, and that she had no access to any meta-details about it or contact with the world outside. That essentially left her the tasks of investigating first the ways the NPCs acted and searching for clues there, seeing how it was they were and were not programmed to act, which would inform her as to whether this was actually an H-MMO or just an unrestricted realism simulator, and second of searching the outside world for clues such as meta-aware NPCs made to help players. 

For that matter, actually, she should probably start by looking for other players. If she could find anyone else who’d been trapped here, she’d be able to uncover clues she’d never think to look for herself. On the other hand, she was the leader of Ainz Ooal Gown; they were a widely feared and despised guild, meaning that players who might be interested in helping the human behind her avatar might also attack her for simply being Cassandra of Ainz Ooal Gown before she could explain her case. 

As she pondered, she also checked the time, and found that it was about 12:50 a.m. The other Floor Guardians would be arriving in fairly short order. It was also, she realised, almost her fourth straight hour playing the game, and she hadn’t yet needed to pee. Her real bladder had about the capacity of a small shot glass, and since her VR gear didn’t include a catheter or bottle for her to use passively she still needed to get up every now and then to empty pee. She didn’t feel the urge to find a toilet at all though. This was, apparently, a game that could suppress feelings from one’s actual body. That wasn’t actually a tremendous challenge, technically speaking, and all full-dive VR games used it to a limited extent to prevent people from madly thrashing about while they played, but to totally suppress one’s body was very much illegal. Not more illegal than cyber-kidnapping, however; perhaps inducing numbness was just par for the course, whatever that course was. Perhaps they’d kidnapped her in body, too. 

The twins’ battle with the elementals was not a long one. The whole process took just a minute or two to finish, and even that was only because the twins played with their food. High-level battles rarely were; PVP battles at that point especially were very likely deadly to both sides if one side hadn’t secured a clear advantage or even certain victory in the first twenty to thirty seconds, often for no more reason than the sheer chaos so many tenth-level spells generated and the amount of damage and negative status effects flying around created. Such battles were often described as Rocket Tag, a game of firing off all your own ICBMs before your opponent could manage the same and everyone was mutually destroyed. 

In the end, when the last elemental’s dark glow finally died out, Aura gave a victorious hoot while Mare sank shakily to his knees. The two had acted like a perfect team, with Aura shapeshifting into many different forms and making use of her whip to tank the enemies and deal damage, while Mare had acted the support as a powerful spellcaster and used magic to buff his sister, heal her, debuff his opponents, hinder them through environmental manipulation, and also deal damage when he had a good moment. Despite his act of fear, the meek elf was a powerhouse of a druid. 

“Good show you two!” Cassandra said. “Excellent work. I think the two of you deserve a reward.” As the two elves looked at her and at each other with uncertainty, she reached into the window of her inventory and produced three metal cups and a long, narrow, bottom-heavy metal pitcher that resembled a flower vase with a cork in the top. This was a Decanter of Endless Water, a fairly common magic item useful for staving off the [Dehydrated] condition, since just having it in one’s inventory kept one passively watered, unlike consumable drinks which had to be actively used. Cassie opened the Decanter and poured from it into one of the cups. Condensation formed immediately on the sides, indicating that the water was quite cold. 

She handed the first cup to Aura. NPCs in Yggdrasil were not affected by the need to eat, but it was likely these new ones at least could if offered. Sure enough, Aura grabbed the cold drink and downed it in one quick gulp that left water pouring down the sides of her face and down her shirt, not even finishing her “ThankyouCassandra-samalgulugluglug!” 

Mare, more trepidatious, asked “Is it really all right if I…. I can make water with my magic too….” 

“Don’t worry, Mare-kun. I have an endless supply. Consider it my treat.” 

With her encouragement, he took the cup and began sipping it politely. 

Cassandra then poured out a final glass for herself and took a drink. As a demon, who like all extra-planar creatures were referred to generically as Outsiders, she was immune to hunger and thirst effects as well as exhaustion, and thus did not need food, water, or rest the way non-Outsiders or -undead players did, and so rarely ate or drank in game. This was partly because Yggdrasil did not have a terribly complex flavour palette, meaning that food was generally quite bland. This new game’s food, if judging even just by this water, was anything but bland: the cold water was the purest, freshest, cleanest, and most flavourful water Cassie had ever had in her life. It was like slipping into a tailored silk gown after a lifetime of jeans, or eating off real silver silverware when one had only ever used plastic. It was, more accurately, like never having had real water before now. If one had never drunk from a Decanter, one would never know what water could truly be. Cassie chugged her first glass as politely as Aura had and then poured herself another, only finishing half of it before simply splashing the rest over her head to bask in the cool water under the hot sun of the Sixth Floor. 

“Do you two want some more?” she asked after letting the water evaporate for a minute or so. 

“Yes! Please splash me too, Cassandra-sama!” Aura said, closing her eyes and holding her hands out as if waiting for Rapture. 

“No thank you, C- Cassandra- s- sama, I’ve had enough,” Mare said. 

“Suit yourself, Mare-kun,” Cassandra said. She then activated the [Fountain] feature of the Decanter with a muttered word and lifted it high over her head. A jet of water shot out the top, creating a fountain above her head and spraying her and Aura like children running through a sprinkler. After so many years of dulled senses while in the body of her avatar, Cassie was overwhelmed by the sheer wave of sensory information, with the feeling of her clothes becoming damp, the feeling of her hair growing heavy, the feeling of tiny rivulets dripping down the skin of her face and chest and legs, it was all so _bright_ she was almost able to forget that she was in a game. She’d always loved swimming as a child, whiling away her every free hour of summer in backyard pools, lakes, ponds, rivers, bath tubs, hot tubs, and anywhere else water could be found, and all those memories made themselves felt like she hadn’t felt them in years. 

She let the fountain pour for quite a while, only turning it off when the timer she’d set for two minutes before the meeting of the Guardians was to start went off. She and Aura were of course thoroughly soaked, but under the blaze of the sun they would dry off quickly. Cassie put a hand against her wet skin and clothes, exploring the extraordinary detail of her sense of touch. She could feel individual fibres of the fabric of her robe, every individual hair on her body and head, the roughness of the keratin of her horns, even the way water evaporated off her skin in the sunlight. _This is amazing. It’s just so real.... How would you even program this?_

She was actually beginning to suspect a way it all could work. Given the richness of detail, it was possible, even likely, that this was not programmed graphics at all, but rather a sort of programmed hallucination. Computers that could directly produce such artificial dreams had been around as rumours for years in the circles of tech enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists alike, and Cassie had no trouble imagining that such a thing could exist. Such a machine would combine elements of traditional VR with a set of laws for how certain phenomena behaved, essentially a shortlist of the laws of physics that mattered for how humans saw the world, especially fluid dynamics, and would use the human brain’s natural ability to fill in gaps in its surroundings with what it expected to see to create far more realistic VR environments than computers could alone. If this was so, she’d likely have a hard time telling if it really was, since such a thing could create a nearly seamless environment with accurate physics. Even if you knew you were in such a simulation, it would be nearly impossible to test it, unlike the ways you could test to see if you were in a real dream. 

A few moments after the water turned off, Aura suddenly whispered “I thought Cassandra-sama would be scarier than this!” to her brother. 

She probably thought Cassie hadn’t heard, but she answered anyway. “Don’t worry Aura-san. I’m not that scary at all.” Though given that she was a 6’6’’ blue demon that was maybe not as true now as it was in real life. 

Aura smiled shyly. Just as she was about to give a response, she was interrupted by another female voice from somewhere more distant. 

“Oya, am I the first to arrive?”

The voice spoke in an Enlgish accent, the same old and wealthy kind that Sebas spoke with, though the voice sounded more like that of a little girl, of someone not yet fully grown. 

Cassandra and the elves all began looking around in search of the voice’s source, and quickly found it. It was indeed a short, adolescent-looking girl who stood nearby, and a strange one: she wore a bell-skirted red-and-purple gothic gown, on top of which was a bolero jacket edged with elaborate frills and lacing, and at the end of her sleeves were a pair of white silk gloves. On her head was a bonnet the same colour as her dress. All told, her only exposed skin was that of her face. 

And it was strange face to behold. Whiter than Albedo, whiter than any member of Cassandra’s rural Irish extended family, white like an ice sheet or pale wax, it was the face of a girl of perhaps fourteen, with huge, intelligent red eyes and a small thin-lipped mouth. Her silvery-white hair was tied back into a long ponytail that fell to the small of her back. She had, Cassandra thought, the appearance of a cute girl trying to look like a beautiful woman, with about 80% success. However, contrary to what her face might say about her age, her breasts bulged forward in a distinctly unchildlike and somewhat undignified manner. 

This girl was the True Vampire Shalltear Bloodfallen, creation of Pereroncino, Guardian of the first three floors of the Great Tomb of Nazarick, and the mightiest of the seven Floor Guardians. 

“Oh. _You._ ” 

The annoyed words belonged to Aura, who was scowling with deep hostility at the newcomer. None of her childish excitement remained, her face pure predator. “Something reeks like blood,” she said, advancing towards Shalltear. “Could it be that your rotting corpse is showing?” 

Shalltear smiled blandly. “What poor taste,” she said, her voice smooth like silk and sharp as glass. “Is this not a formal meeting? Do _try_ to have some composure, little girl.” She then approached Cassandra and gingerly took her Mistress’ hand in her own. “Ah dear Mistress Cassandra, the only one I cannot rule over.” She placed a kiss on Cassie’s hand, thin red lips parting to allow for a light touch of tongue, and looked up at her with hooded, lustful eyes. 

She played the part of a seductress perfectly. She had the words and motions and expressions down to a T, as if drawing from long experience. The effect was unfortunately ruined, however, by her youth; she was too childish by far and too short. She was like an 8th-grader acting an adult in a school play, and the discrepancy between expectation and reality was comical. 

_Is this really your creation, Pero-san? Did you really create a gothic-lolita seductress vampire loli to be a Guardian of Nazarick?_ Pereroncino was an h-game aficionado who would at the slightest provocation go off on endless rants about the beauty of the art form, as he called it. Cassandra had to purse her lips and breath deliberately through her nose a few times to stifle a laugh before she could respond, but eventually did manage to say, “Greetings, Guardian Shalltear-san.”

“That’s enough out of you, corpse breath,” Aura growled, interrupting the exchange. 

Shalltear looked annoyed, her composure slightly fractured. “Ara, you’re still here, shorty? I couldn’t see you, so I thought you might have gone.” Aura’s face was now twitching with anger. Shalltear then ignoring her altogether turned to Mare, who was trying to make himself seem small. “It must be so hard for you, having a sister like _that._ Best to leave her soon, lest you end up a weirdo like her.” 

Mare blanched, knowing that he was being used to instigate a fight and wanting no part in it. 

Aura then finally dropped the bomb. “Leave him outta this, fake tits!”

Shalltear finally lost it. “What the hell are you talking about?” she said, her voice squeaky with anger. 

Cassandra snorted. _Hah! Pero also gave her a-cup angst._

“Hmph! It’s so obvious. I mean, how many pads did you stuff in there? 

“Uwah! Uh. No no no!” Shalltear started waving her hands in front of her, as if she could dispel Aura’s words the way one could a fart. 

“You packed so much in there…. I bet it shifts around when you run, right?” 

“Shut, shut up shorty! It’s not like you have anything to show off either! At least I have _something_ to show.”

“Hah! No you don’t. It’s pads all the way down. Besides, I’m just a kid. I’ll be all curvy one day. Dead girls never grow. How sad, not to have any future….”

Cassandra by this point had turned away with a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. _Pero! Buku! I’ve missed you two so much...._ There was so much of the siblings in their creations Cassandra was reeling from the nostalgia. The pair had even once had an argument that went almost exactly like this, with Pereroncino accusing his sister of stuffing her chest and Bukubukuchagama countering his by saying he stuffed his pants at parties. 

Just as the two girls were pulling out weapons to actually fight, and Cassandra was getting ready to intervene, another voice was heard in the arena, taking the girls’ attention away from each other.

“What. A. Ruckus.”

It was an inhuman voice, one like metal scraping on ice. It came from what appeared to be a seven-foot-tall praying mantis made of ice. It had a spiked tail twice as long as its body, four arms, and two legs. Huge mandibles extending from the sides of its head looked powerful enough to cut steel. On its back were several weapons and a shield, including a long, silvery polearm and a black-hilted sword that seemed to draw light out of the very air around it. 

This was Cocytus, a unique monster created by Warrior Takemikuzuchi, Guardian of the Fifth Floor of Nazarick. 

“You. Stand. Before. A. Supreme. Being. Control. Yourselves.” 

“That little brat started it!” Shalltear protested, pointing an accusatory gloved finger at Aura. 

“Actually-” 

“Actually, you two, play time’s over,” Cassandra interjected, and immediately both girls lowered their heads in shame before her, then bowed. “Hmm. Welcome, Guardian Cocytus-san.” 

“I. Came. As. Immediately. As. I. Could. Upon. Receiving. Your. Summons. Cassandra-sama.” The air in front of his face fogged up as he breathed, with tiny sparkles of ice crystals glinting in the sunlight. Standing near him for most ordinary creatures would have been enough to develop the [Frostbite] disease and take cold damage, but Cassie was a demon and thus immune to cold, so standing around him was more like being in a nicely air-conditioned room. 

“I see. There were no intruders, then? Nothing out of the ordinary?” 

“Nothing. Cassandra-sama.”

“Thank you for being on alert, at least. And thank you for coming on short notice.” 

“An. Hour. Is. An. Eternity. Where. The. Orders. Of. A. Supreme. Being. Are. Concerned. Ah. I. See. Demiurge. And. Albedo. Have. Arrived.” Cocytus pointed to a spot behind and to the right of Cassandra.

Cassie turned to follow his gaze, and saw two figures approaching. One was a man in a red- and yellow-striped suit. He was tall, about six feet or so, and had neatly-combed black hair above round pince-nez glasses, which sat over kindly eyes so narrow they could hardly be said to be open at all. His skin was tan, and the way he walked and carried himself out one in the mind of a professional lawyer or businessman.

However, his gentlemanly appearance could not hide the air of evil that radiated from him, nor could it hide the scorpion’s tail that extended from his waist, segmented and tipped with nasty-looking eight-inch stinger. Faint black fire seemed to follow when his tail moved. 

This was the fire demon Demiurge, creation of Ulbert Alain Odle, Guardian of the Seventh Floor of the Great Tomb of Nazarick. 

The other figure was Albedo, who Cassie, now calm and focused, really _saw_ for the first time. She was model-tall, almost as tall as Demiurge, and simply radiant. She walked with a proud and easy gait, and wherever she stood one’s eyes seemed to be irresistibly drawn to her. Even though she was very pale-skinned and dark of hair, it seemed when one saw her that it was everything else that was in black and white and in her the only real colour. The other Guardians clearly noticed too, and every one of them save Demiurge gave her a lingering stare as she walked towards those already gathered.

“Ah, good,” Cassie said upon seeing them. “Guardians Demiurge-san and Albedo-san. It seems we’re all here except for one.” 

“Cassandra-sama, forgive my saying so,” said Demiurge, his voice smooth as butter and evil like a local politician’s, “but are there not two others who have yet to arrive?”

“Hm? Oh, no. The Guardians of the Fourth and Eighth Floors are only to be moved under special circumstances. I’m only waiting on Sebas and the maids now.” 

“Then,” Albedo said, speaking with a gentle yet commanding tone, “let us pledge our loyalty to the Supreme Beings while we wait.” She then with a flick of her black wings guided the other five gathered Guardians into a line, Aura and Mare on one side of her, Cocytus, Shalltear, and Demiurge on the other, and together they bowed deeply for a long moment. 

Wait- _Supreme_ Beings _, did she say? They call_ me _Supreme all the time, but they’ve never referred to the rest of my guildmates that way. I suppose that we would be to them; we did create them after all, that would make us like gods. Also an interesting way of separating players and NPCs from a game design perspective._

Shalltear then stepped forward and knelt before Cassandra in the manner of a vassal to their lord. “Shalltear Bloodfallen, Guardian of the First, Second, and Third Floors, presents herself to the Master.” Her tone had returned to the rich voice it had started as before the fight. 

Cocytus, next in line, stepped forward after her and knelt as well. “Cocytus. Guardian. Of. The. Fifth. Floor. Presents. Himself. To. The. Master.”

“Demiurge, Guardian of the Seventh Floor, presents himself to the Master.”

“Aura Bella Fiora, Co-Guardian of the Sixth Floor, presents herself to the Master.” 

“M- Mare Bello F- Fiore, Co-Guardian of the Sixth Floor, presents himself to the Master.”

And finally, “Albedo, Guardian Overseer of Nazarick, presents herself to the Master. With the exception of Fourth Floor Guardian Goliath, and Eight Floor Guardian Victim, all guardians are now gathered. And thus, we do pledge our utmost and undying loyalty.”

They gave another synchronised group bow, slower and more deliberate this time. 

Cassandra didn’t know how to proceed. The air felt heavy, like but not like a classroom full of waiting students. They seemed to expect from her a more of feudal lord’s than a teacher’s behaviour, so she decided to lean into the part. “Raise your heads,” she said. The Guardians obliged. “First of all, I would like to thank you all for coming here. Now, let me be blunt: I believe the Great Tomb of Nazarick may be caught up in some kind of dangerous situation, possibly even under attack from forces unknown.” There was a general turning of heads and murmuring at that statement. _Now how do I explain this next part? Hmm. Yes, that’ll work._ “One hour ago, exactly at midnight, one of my most important powers stopped working. It is a Spell-Like Ability called [Call GM], one that…. allows me to contact other Supreme Beings, such as members of my or other guilds. I have no idea what could even block such a power, let alone make it cease to exist.

“And so, I sent Sebas to the surface, along with the Maids of the Pleiades to investigate. In fact, I shall contact him now and have him come here to report.”

Looks of surprise crossed every face but Albedo’s, as they realised that the gravity of the situation called for sending one of Nazarick’s mightiest warriors and its battle maids besides just to scout the outside.

Cassie then cast [Message] again, calling for Sebas. “Sebas-san,” she said. “What have you found on the surface? Is everything alright?”

“Yes, everything is alright, Cassandra-sama. We are in the middle of a forest. There are no apparent hostiles within one kilometre, nor any creature but base animals, including a black bear.”

“What? A forest, not a swamp?”

“Indeed. Narberal Gamma and Shizu Delta flew invisibly up to a height of one kilometre, and report that the forest is flat and unbroken all the way to the horizon in every direction.”

“No mountains or hills?”

“None, just trees and a few small creeks.”

“And the sky?”

“Clear and starry. There are two full moons in the eastern sky, one much larger than the other.” 

_Shit. Fuck shit goddammit fuck._ The Great Tomb of Nazarick was supposed to be situated in a dense, monster-filled swamp surrounded by high rocky hills all beneath a blanket of eternal dark clouds. “Right. Come at once to the Colosseum on the Sixth Floor; I’m holding a meeting of the Floor Guardians here, and wish to hear yours and the maids’ full report.”

“Right away, Cassandra-sama.” A burst of white noise indicated the severed connection. 

Cassandra then turned her attention back to the guardians in front of her. “It appears in fact that our situation is even more unknown, indeed an emergency. Nazarick’s surroundings have changed dramatically, as if we have been teleported.”

“Teleported, Cassandra-sama?” Albedo said. “What could do such a thing?” 

“If we’re lucky, Albedo-san, it’s just enemy players. Even then I have no idea _how_ they could have accomplished this.” _It would appear at least that Nazarick alone was transported to a new game world, instead of this new game importing Yggdrasil’s wholesale. That makes things infinitely more complicated, especially if I can’t find a game map._

“L- lucky?” Mare repeated, gulping. 

Cassandra nodded gravely. 

As if to punctuate her words, the black sphere of a [Gate] spell opened in the centre of the arena, not far from the meeting. Out from it stepped Sebas, followed by six battle maids. They all formed a neat line with three maids to either side of Sebad and gave a synchronised bow. 

“Sebas, maids, welcome. Please, tell us what you have found about our present surroundings.” 

Sebas nodded. “We explored the area around the Great Tomb out to one kilometre on foot, and established that it was flat land covered by dense forest. There are three streams that run through this region, the widest of which was some four feet wide and six inches deep, the smallest just a few inches across. There are no roads, paths, or artificial structures or materials of any kind. There are no humanoids or other intelligent creatures, nor indeed any creature larger than a man.” 

“No monsters?” Cassandra interjected. 

“None, just a few small animals with no combat prowess.” 

“What kinds?”

“Squirrels, frogs, fish, birds, and deer.” 

“I see. And the trees? There was nothing special about them?” 

“As far as we could tell, they were just trees.”

“Hmph. Thank you Sebas, and Maids.” 

The group bowed again. 

“Alright. Shalltear!”

“Yes, Cassandra-sama?”

“Organise a watch of the outside of the Tomb with Skeletons and Lichs from the first floor. Have them keep watch all night and all tomorrow; check in once an hour. Make sure they report any even minor changes. I will investigate myself once I am satisfied that nothing dangerous is hiding nearby.”


	3. Draft I Chapter 3

The sun of this new world rose at what Cassandra’s clock told her was 6:00 a.m. 

That was about the same time as it would have back in Vancouver. On a normal day, the real Mackenzie Connolly would be getting up around 6:00 to shower, make herself a light breakfast and some tea, and then catch the bus to work. She’d see Bob Newell in the teacher’s lounge, who’d offer her a morning doughnut, and Tracy Smith, whose chosen profession as an English teacher didn’t match her foul vocabulary. She’d say hi to that cute counselor Daniel LeMay, and try to avoid getting stuck in another conversation with Vice Principal Carter about her cute dogs and what they did last night. She’d be going over lesson plans, making sure she had everything she needed, grading papers, fishing out supplies for her Chemistry students, saying hello to students that got there early, enjoying her travel cup full of hot, sweet tea. 

She wouldn’t have spent the whole night waiting deep within Nazarick for an imminent enemy invasion. She hadn’t been pulling all-nighters for this game since college, and she was over thirty now. Cassandra’s whole night had passed agonisingly slowly while, steeped in paranoia, she waited in the throne room for some threat to show itself. The Guardians spent the time shoring up their defenses, with Shalltear organising parties of skeletons to patrol the forest that now surrounded the keep and placing illusion spells to ward it from sight and divination and Albedo and Demiurge racing around to organise Nazarick’s physical defenses and seeing to troop assignments. 

Why they needed to, Cassie wasn’t sure, for Nazarick should have had it’s ducks all in a row automatically, but nevertheless they did. Perhaps it was just realism; Cassie took the wait as an opportunity to read up the full profiles on the Guardians from Nazarick’s auto-generated Developer Notes book, one an item set every member of every guild in Yggdrasil received on joining, and found that Demiurge was listed as “Master of Defense” in Nazarick according to his fluff, much as Albedo was “Guardian Overseer,” or Aura the official “Beast Tamer” of the Tomb, in charge of seeking out strange and mighty new creatures to staff it. In Yggdrasil, they of course wouldn’t have moved from their natural spots, all according to pre-written instructions, but better roleplaying was par for the course as far as this realistic new game was concerned. 

Though in such a stressful time, she probably wouldn’t have been able to if she tried, Cassandra found she had no urge to sleep. She barely even felt tired; stressed out and weary, certainly, but more  _ I need to hit something and then scream for forty days and forty nights  _ weary than  _ I want to rest my head and pass out forever and ever  _ weary. It was nothing like the times she’d pulled all-nighters to play Yggdrasil or to study back in college or party with her friends in high school, fighting exhaustion with determination, or like the times she’d spent the night up from fear or heartbreak or just plain insomnia. It was like no night at all, really. 

She worried absently about the fate of her brain, if she wasn’t able to sleep, for not sleeping would drive one mad. If she never felt the need to here she’d probably die in a couple of weeks and face all sorts of cognitive decline beforehand. Perhaps she was being hasty, though; the stress of kidnapping was unfamiliar to her, so maybe this was normal for victims. It was also possible that she was already unconscious, and frankly that made more sense; if someone could make a hallucinogenic VR game, it would probably be easier to keep her unconscious and dreaming forever than awake and hallucinating forever.

She hadn’t ruled out that this was a natural dream, either, but it didn’t feel like proper dream. A colleague at her high school had once gone off about the wonders of lucid dreaming, but Cassandra couldn’t remember what she’d said about how to tell if one was dreaming or not or how to induce a lucid dream. 

She also still hadn’t had the urge to pee or indeed any other bodily function that would take her out of the game, but strangely enough, she actually had needed to pee  _ in  _ the game. This was a very confusing feeling at first, but she’d eventually caved to it and searched for a secluded place to do her business, and found that the game indeed simulated the real thing all too well. No game Cassandra had ever heard of actually simulated real bodily needs that way, because bodily needs were the kind of inconvenience people wanted to be free from in games, on top of being a no-no to most regulatory agencies around the world. If this was an h-game, that it was possible was perhaps not such a wonder, but not the need. The sheer difference of quality between most games and this was so great however that she found this theory increasingly unlikely as time went on. Who would put so much work into something to wank to, anyway? 

As the next day dawned, nothing happened. The sun rose, and it proved a normal sun. According to Shalltear and her skeleton sorties, the forest was full of bird noises and small animals and not much else, but Cassandra had far too much experience with ambushes to imagine that meant much, so she’d decided to give it a full twenty-four hours and let the skeletons wander several kilometres away before even trying to venture to the surface herself. 

That left the whole day to take stock of her situation, which meant touring the Tomb to see what had changed. Since this game had been given a realism upgrade, she expected that probably meant changes to the physical environment, not just to NPCs and to the general animations and graphics. Indeed, she found out almost immediately that she was correct. The Throne Room was basically as it had been before the change, but the Ninth Floor was altered drastically. For one, all its shops were real, with the exception of the Great Purchase, which remained boarded up. The gas station even pumped something that looked and smelled and burned just like real gasoline. The Observatory, the player house of Blue Planet, one of Cassandra’s guildmates, had a real telescope that actually magically saw through the Earth and atmosphere to look at stars in any direction. The kitchens that served the Homunculus Maids and other serving staff NPCs had actual facilities that could be used to cook food like one might in the real world, instead of taking ingredients from one’s inventory and placing them on the counter before selecting a meal, then watching them transform instantly into food. The list of changes went on and on. 

She also found that her friends’ real-world downloads still existed as items in this world. Since full-dive VR precluded simply opening another tab to do things such as listening to music, and because many people enjoyed simply spending leisure time in-game for its own sake, Yggdrasil allowed one to access licensed ebooks and purchased music as physical objects in game, as books or magical black disks that resembled vinyl records. In her friends’ houses contained probably thousands of books on every imaginable subject and countless many albums of real world music from every imaginable style, from her own mixture of Irish folk, classical, and classic and alt rock to old-school jazz and synthwave and pop music from Japan, Korea, China, the US, and Central America and a few other places besides representing many eras. She even found an album of Mongolian throat singing metal. There were also albums of comedy routines, audiobooks, and a few other miscellaneous items like a record with hundreds of hours of Cantonese for Dummies. At the very least, she was not totally without any access to the outside world at all, and was not likely to die from boredom anytime soon. 

Sorting through her friends’ junk kept her busy all day, and without much in the way of bodily needs to keep her abreast of passing time she didn’t notice how much she’d spent searching until finally her alarm told her it was 23:30:00, half an hour from midnight, when she’d decided to go to the surface. 

This brought her to rather thorny question:  _ Do I go to the surface and start gathering intelligence, or do I assume the worst for now and start spending serious resources on building up Nazarick’s defenses right away? I’m extremely vulnerable to invading forces at it is; Nazarick’s NPCs were meant to be passive defenses, designed to fight in conjunction with many players; now there’s only me, and according to Shalltear’s minions all of the defensive spells around the Tomb didn’t get taken here with the place itself. I’d have absolutely no warning until I was already under attack. I can’t even search the game forums to see if anyone’s been publicly planning an invasion.  _

Foreknowledge had long been one of the keys to the success of Ainz Ooal Gown as a PK guild, the primary difference between them and the competition, and in order to keep themselves on top they at their height had fully a quarter of the guild devoted to part- or full-time spycraft, using everything from trolling forums to the use of in-game bribery, blackmail, extortion to find out everything they could about virtually every enemy they fought. Because of this well-oiled intelligence service, they had been able to not just kill players but invade and conquer may other guilds’ bases, and in the treasury still sat over a dozen Guild Weapons they took as spoils. Cassandra had herself been a part of that team, the person in charge of anti-divination and magical counterintelligence, and had a treasure trove of items and many known spells specifically for examining people and places from a distance or blocking people from doing the same in return. 

The real problem was that her most critical countermeasures, the epic-level spell [Cloister], which for select creatures blocked all teleportation, divination magic, other such things in a five-kilometre radius, had a full ten-minute casting time and would immediately alert any players that would be within that circle that someone was casting an epic-level spell. She would be a sitting duck surrounded by duck hunters and hounds for the eternity of those few minutes. Yet, without it, someone with decent stealth, a [True Seeing] spell to pierce illusions, and scroll of [Message] could announce her location to the whole world and do so without her even knowing. 

On the other hand, there may not even be any other players there; after all, this wasn’t Kansas anymore. Given that the rules of Yggdrasil still seemed to apply, it seemed plausible that anyone else logged on at the moment of the very end might be here too, possibly also with their guild bases, which might well prove disastrous for her, but it seemed equally plausible that she and she alone was the sole inhabitant of this world. If nothing else, [Call GM] and [Message GM] continued not to work, as did any attempts to Message players that she knew of, including her guildmates. 

_ It’s probably best to risk gathering intelligence right away,  _ she eventually decided.  _ I’ll be vulnerable on the surface, but it’s better than poking the bear too early. I should gather a few items from my house then....  _

A few minutes later, prepared as she could be for the danger, Cassie activated her [Greater Teleport] Spell-Like Ability and spoke the name “Shalltear Bloodfallen” as her location. This would take her directly to the presence of Shalltear, wherever she happened to be at the time. Before actually going above, Cassie wanted to talk at length with the vampire about what was there, what her impressions were, and anything else that might be important. 

This proved a less-than-stellar idea. When her vision returned after the familiar moment of darkness the spell put her through, she saw that she was standing in a bedroom. On the bed was a nude Shalltear, face down, ass up, with both hands between her legs and a rapturous look in her blood-red eyes. Those eyes went wide as dinner plates when the Guardian saw her Master appear in her bedroom. Shalltear shrieked in reaction, and started to pull the sheets over her tiny frame, and with perhaps a little too much hesitation Cassie activated [Greater Teleportation] again, this time specifying the Nazarick Surface Building. 

Just seconds after arriving, Cassie heard the staticky sounds of a Message trying to contact her. She hesitated for a second before accepting, but decided to go ahead. 

Shalltear’s silky aristocratic voice came through. “Does my Mistress not wish to join?” 

_ Am I really sure this isn’t some h-game?  _ “Shalltear-san, your Mistress apologizes for interrupting your, ah, fun. And no, I have business I came to discuss with you. Please dress yourself and come to the surface building.” 

“My dear Cassandra-sama is tease.” The Message cut out. 

_ The fuck was that.... I mean, that’s just a little too real for me. If this is an h-game, that might make sense, but since when did NPCs just go masturbating totally on their own? Unless that whole scene was put together instantly when I teleported. That could be. I mean, it would make about as much sense as the rest of this place.... Anyway. I need to focus.  _

Trying hard to put that scene out of her mind, Cassandra looked around her at the Nazarick Surface Building. It was a stone mausoleum, cut from white marble, and covered in cobwebs inside. Around the small room where she had arrived, the room where the staircase to Nazarick’s first floor descended, were a number of empty stone coffins, all open, some smashed, all ancient and weathered-looking. Ever-burning magic torches kept it well-lit even in the midnight gloom. The whole building was quite small, a half-dozen rooms like this one, making for a tiny cap to the vast bottle that was the Great Tomb of Nazarick. 

She still remembered vividly the first time Ainz Ooal Gown had come here. Back when the guild was just her and a dozen others, they were exploring an area released as part of the Mists of Niflheim expansion, and had come across this place which their store-bought maps only called “Underground Tomb.” They had ventured casually inside, totally unaware of the dangers that lurked ahead in the deep dungeon. 

Ultimately, however, they had succeeded in clearing all six original floors of the Underground Tomb without a single death, and without having to leave to resupply. By the ragged end, they had come within a few nanometres of death many times and were totally out of potions, scrolls, and all other expendable items, but they had managed it, and when they finally defeated the Greater Jungle Demons that were the boss fight of the Sixth Floor they had received a letter from the game’s developers that they had won the right to use the Tomb as a guild base for their achievement. No other guild had ever gained control of such a mighty and illustrious base as a high-level dungeon, nor did any replicate their feat in all the years that followed. 

Just a couple of seconds after Shalltear’s message, the black sphere of a [Gate] spell opened up in the middle of the room, and out stepped the vampire, back in her colourful gothic lolita dress, flanked by four tall, pale women in white gowns. These were some of the level 75 Vampire Brides that served as her bodyguards. “My Mistress summons me,” she said, bowing elegantly. Her bodyguards bowed along with her. 

“Yes. I want to know everything your servants have found out there, and to see whatever progress you’ve made towards a map of our surroundings.” 

Shalltear’s face fell, visibly disappointed. “Very well, Cassandra-sama. Follow me.” She made for the door, heading out into the night air, and Cassandra followed, with the Vampire Brides at the rear of the group. 

Immediately outside the entrance to Nazarick was a graveyard. Rows of old, weathered gravestones on a field of grass extended outward for about a hundred or so feet before terminating in a wall of dark trees. Several skeletons in groups patrolled through the yard, which lent itself well to the atmosphere, but the sketchbooks many of them carried were out-of-place enough to somewhat ruin the effect. 

“As Sebas-san reported,” Shalltear began, “the forest is flat and featureless for up to several kilometres away. There’s nothing out there but weak animals.” 

“And the rivers?” 

“Yes, there are a handful. They all flow to the north or northeast. None are very large.”

“Hm. Alright.”  _ I’m not going to find out much else unless I do this myself.  _ Cassandra then turned around and went back into the Mausoleum. There, she pulled out a pile of blankets from her inventory and began placing them on the ground. 

“Do you intend to sleep up here, Cassandra-sama?” Shalltear asked from behind her. 

"No, I'm afraid not," Cassandra said, not turning around. "But I will be unconscious for a while. There is an item I intend to use for scrying which will let me see the world from afar. Guardian Shalltear-san, I will need you or another of the Guardians to be with me at all times while I'm out, in case of emergency."

Shalltear's expression became one of eager dutifulness. "Yes, Cassandra-sama! We will make sure you're safe!" 

Cassie nodded in acknowledgement. 'Just final preparations now.' She then raised a hand and began casting. "[Greater Nondetection]. [Anti-Scrying]. [Extended Greater Repel Divination]. [Extended Greater Wards (Fog and Confusion; Players Trigger on Proximity)]. [Contingent Teleportation (Combat Within 100 Feet)]. [Extended Extended Extended Alarm (Players)]. [Extended Dimension Lock]." That covered the basics at least, but wouldn't protect her against a determined foe. Having a Guardian there with her would go a long way towards giving her warning, but if a player got close enough the AOE damage they could do would make it impossible for Shalltear to act as her shield.

Once that was finished Cassie lay herself down on the blankets, then withdrew from her inventory a small wooden box and placed it down beside her. It was roughly cubic, around eight inches on a side, and decorated with simple geometric designs in pastel paint. This was the Box of the Masked Walk, a custom magic item she'd designed with Yggdrasil's very open-ended crafting system. It allowed the user to create a normal animal whose eyes one could see through and whose body one could direct, up to a point. Enemies seeing the animal would only see the actual animal, not the puppetmaster, and no-one could harm the caster through it the way they could through a Familiar. 

With a final breath, Cassie flicked the box's lid open. Immediately her vision went dark just as if she had teleported, but when it returned, it was not her own eyes but rather those of something much shorter. She looked around, finding herself unable to move her eyes and instead having to move her whole head, and saw that she now had a body covered in mottled black-and-white feathers. Above her, she saw a pair of huge red eyes staring at her uncertainly. She opened her beak and hooted at the vampire, then simply took off into the night air. 

There are few things in the world as exhilarating as flying, even as a human in a plane, and for birds it was on a whole other level. Yggdrasil had only simulated air resistance that increased with velocity, but this game or dream whatever it was simulated all the complex ways air flows over wings and bodies in flight. Cassie could feel every little detail of the wind rifling through her feathers, every little jolt of turbulence, every little change in temperature and wind direction, and even the way the wind resisted her feathers moving around to adjust to changing conditions. Cassie almost lost herself in this feeling, spending what was probably several minutes just performing dives and twirls and rolls through the air on her silent wings. 

Once she’d regained her focus, she turned upward, soaring up far above the trees in broad loops until she could see for miles in all directions. Or, at least, until the horizon was many kilometres away; as far as even her acute owl eyes could discern, the forest was a dark ocean that went on and on forever. Where the ground was dark, however, the sky was brilliant: not two but four moons hung in the sky, most of them smaller than Earth’s, and most of them close to full. Even dulled by moonlight, there were so many stars in the sky it seemed more like they formed a background broken by darkness rather than the other way around. 

And the  _ sound!  _ An owl’s most important means of locating a meal were its ears, and Cassie’s heard a thousand thousand different noises she’d never heard before. The gentle rustling of wind through the trees had become a myriad different noises, from the howling of wolves to large animals foraging in the cover of darkness, from the hoots of owls and calling of other birds, the babbling of moving water, and even stranger sounds, too, including one rather unpleasant one that resembled a monkey or ape vocalisation. 

Cassie gradually surrendered her height until the was flying in amongst the trees again, and followed the sound of water until she reached a small creek, probably one of those that Sebas and Shalltear had described. She dropped down to just a foot or two above the water’s surface and skimmed it downstream, intent to follow it until it reached people or the sea or both. 

She flew for a long time. Five minutes, ten, thirty, an hour, two hours, three. The river joined several others, growing from about two feet across to maybe 15. The forest broke open in many places into extensive wetlands, including many places where Cassie almost lost sight of the river’s actual channel and had to fly up to get a better view to find its outlet. The area looked very much like a pristine wilderness: Cassie saw no roads, fences, or buildings, or any other evidence of human activity for what was likely most of a hundred miles along the river’s length. The region was incredibly rich with wildlife, too, and just out in the open along the river were deer, moose, boar, large cats, foxes, bats, wolves, a huge cow-like creature that Cassie thought might be an aurochs or something like it, and even a group of small monkey-like creatures which were probably the source of the unpleasant calls she’d heard before. 

Just as she began to despair that she was a thousand miles from anything, she finally saw what she was looking for: a building. 

_ People! Other people!  _ As if a dam had suddenly broken all the fear and loneliness of the last day rushed back to the forefront of her mind, and Cassie hooted as loud as her powerful bird lungs would let her.  _ Other people exist here! _

Her heart now racing, she flew as fast as she could over to the building. Up close, it looked rather like a farmhouse. The house was tiny, wooden, and just one story, shoddy-looking and roofed with thatch. It had no glass windows, only wooden shutters, and for a chimney just a hole in the top from which a very thin trickle of smoke rose gently into the night air. It didn’t even have a front door, just a cloth pulled over the front. This was, plainly, a peasant’s hut if Cassie had ever seen one, which she hadn’t. It was considerably cruder than the neat wooden peasant houses commoner NPCs in Yggdrasil lived in. Perched on the thatched roof, listening carefully, she could hear several different creatures breathing inside, though through the chimney hole she could see nothing but the coals of a small fire in the midst of pitch darkness. 

Cassie jumped off the roof and took to following the river again, and passed several more farmhouses before coming to a collection of them. A village, on the banks of the river. It was a small place, just a few dozen houses, enough for a hundred for a hundred or so people at most. Even so, it was  _ people.  _ They may well be NPCs, but given how real those of Nazarick had been acting, that might not matter so much. But it proved that she wasn’t alone in a forest, and that there was a whole world out there. It might even have other players, or better yet, more kidnapping victims locked in this nightmare with her. 

Cassie kept following the river once she’d passed by this village.  _ Maybe there are larger towns, even cities! People live along water, I’m sure I’ll find more if I keep going.  _ That village turned out to be highly isolated, however. She flew for several hours more, following the river downstream as it continued to swell, until the starry sky was beginning to turn grey, and saw nothing else but forest and swamp and wildlife. 

As the sun was just peeking its first light above the horizon, Cassie flew high up into the dawn air for one final look, searching for something, anything, but she saw nothing; the ground was an endless sea of patchy forest.  _ Damn. Where’s a good city when you need one, eh? No matter though; I know what I came to learn. There’s more to this world, other people and other places. I shouldn’t prolong this if I don’t need to.  _

Cassie closed her owl eyes and felt the world fall away. When she opened them again, she was back in her demon avatar and lying comfortably on her blankets. Shalltear and the Vampire Brides were still standing over her, almost unmoved in the six hours or so since midnight. 

“Cassandra-sama!” Shalltear exclaimed. “You’ve returned! I worried you might not come back.”

“Well, I have,” Cassandra replied. “There is a village far downriver from here, and I intend to visit it soon. But first….” She raised her hand, and started the process of casting [Cloister]. 

_ Alright, this is good. I have a direction now. _


	4. Draft I Chapter 4

Albedo’s scent was intoxicating. 

This was, perhaps, to be expected; Albedo was a succubus, after all, and lust demons were known for being alluring. 

In Cassie’s hands was a mirror, some three feet wide and five feet high. From the way she carried it in one hand, one might assume it did not weigh much, but it was instead the case that Cassie was very strong. Nowhere near strong enough to act as a warrior against other high-level opponents, but still, levelling up advanced all one’s base stats, not just their most important one, and Cassandra’s high level meant her strength was not inconsiderable. Demons also got bonuses to strength when one took racial levels, so her strength was modestly higher than a human’s might be with a class build like hers. 

Within the mirror itself was not a reflection of Cassie, but rather of a grassy field, where three blonde women were busy pulling weeds and seeing to it that a handful of freshly-shorn-looking sheep were taken to pasture kept fed and watered. This was a Mirror of Far Viewing, a mid-grade magic item that allowed one to see people and places one knew about from any distance, as well as move around to see the surroundings, very much like a magic drone camera.

It was a fairly average magic item, useful but easily blocked. It could also be turned against its user, becoming a vector for damaging offensive spells to the user if the subject made use of active defences, which was why Cassie had not made use of it before, but to examine peasant villagers from afar it was quite valuable. 

Sitting next to her in the Meeting Room was Albedo, watching disinterestedly over her shoulder. She was rather too close, much closer than merely seeing into the mirror would require. Close enough that Cassie could take in her scent and feel the infectious heat of her body. Albedo’s long glossy hair tickled her shoulder and arm, driving her to distraction. 

_ This has to be intentional. I mean, if I were someone like her and my boss made me watch drone footage of village life I’d be pretty bored too. Still, what’s she-  _

Albedo leaned forward to rest her chin on her delicate hand in a slow, casual motion. And, almost as if by total accident, gently nudge up against Cassie. When she was not rebuffed, she doubled down, making herself comfortable by nuzzling her head on Cassie's arm.

Cassie’s face burned, the thought to push her away battling the urge to invite her touch further.  _ She’s.... She’s definitely flirting with me now. Do I stop this? I've never played any h-games, and it's not like many real girls flirted with me either. Is there some secret protocol for this?  _

_ Wait! No! I need to focus.  _

Very slowly, and with great force of will, Cassie pushed Albedo away. "It's time to visit the village," she said. Albedo pouted for the merest fraction of a second, then peeled up at Cassie's words. "No one's come through in days, and nothing else has happened except for that cow that got spooked yesterday, so we're not likely to have any unwanted company. Put Nazarick on medium alert until we've made contact, then come back here."

Albedo's broad mouth grinned brightly. "Understood, Cassandra-sama!" she said, and vanished before she'd fully risen from her seat.

Cassie then flicked her hand across the mirror, and the image within vanished, leaving in its place a female face with blue skin, curly black hair, and a pair of slender horns curling backward across the skull. Although she had seen her avatar's face in the mirrors of Yggdrasil endlessly many times, the detail she could see in this dream or game or whatever it was still took her breath away. Every little bump and crack and ridge in her skin stood out clearly. Her eyes, once just white with irises and pupils, now had a network of blood vessels. Every hair was quite distinct from every other hair, rather than acting like a fluid in a sack the way it used to, and even had tiny flecks of dandruff when unwashed. 

As she watched, the blue of the face quickly drained away into a pale white, leaving no colour but for a light smattering of freckles across the nose and cheeks, the hair uncurling and dying itself red from root to tip, black eyes turning calf brown. The end result was not unlike Cassie's real face, the one her students and coworkers and doctors knew, albeit smoothed of its real imperfections such as her beaky nose and squinty eyes.

This was [Change Shape], a demonic racial ability that allowed one to take the shape of almost anything even vaguely human-shaped. As a minor shapeshift it was beyond reproach to low- or mid-level illusion-piercing abilities, though not the more powerful tools used in Yggdrasil's major cities, as such being the tool that allowed heteromorphic players to quest out in the countryside. 

Before three days ago it had only allowed her to take preset forms, skins she had designed beforehand, but now allowed her to alter her appearance at will simply by imagining.

Once satisfied with her new form, Cassie dug into her inventory and took out a simple blue dress. These were [Robes of the Ancient Arcane], a set of high-level robes she had spent the last two days re-skinning so that should wouldn't walk into the obviously deeply impoverished village wearing her usual sumptuous red silk. Impressions would likely matter to NPCs this intelligent. 

As she was giving her new form now properly outfitted a final once-over in the mirror, she heard the quiet 'whoosh' of someone teleporting in behind her. Turning, she found she was facing a figure dressed in coal-black plate armour from head to toe, carrying an equally black mace that seemed to radiate purple light. 

The figure then spoke. "Shall we depart now, Cassandra-sama? Are we to destroy the village now?"

"Albedo? Why are you dressed like that? And what do you mean, 'destroy the village?' We're going to look for quests."

Even while completely concealed behind armour, Albedo still managed to radiate confusion. "We're not going to destroy it?"

"No, we aren't going to destroy it for the glory of Nazarick. We're going to make peaceful contact so that we can gather information." 

Albedo, along with many of the other NPCs of the Tomb, regarded the humans of the village and indeed everything outside the Tomb's walls with contempt and naked hostility. When she had yesterday gathered all the Guardians together to show them the village and discuss plane, they had reacted not with curiosity but rather by competing to come up with creative methods of conquest, many of which  _ started  _ with eating people in public as a warning to dissenters. This had taken Cassie so much by surprise that her teacher's instinct to shut down such talk had taken a long few minutes to engage. 

"Look, there's not going to be any burning or pillaging. Here, put away your armour and wear this-" Cassie withdrew a dress similar though green and less powerful than what she wore as well as an empty leather backpack from her inventory and held them out towards Albedo "-and put away your horns and wings. We're going to pretend like we're just two travellers passing through, and seeing what we can learn in the process. Okay? And put away that mace Ginnungagap is irreplaceable."

"I…. I understand, Cassandra-sama." Albedo armour vanished back into her inventory, which left her completely naked. Her wings, freed from the armour, unfurled and fluttered but made no attempt to cover her. 

Cassie stared at her quite stunned as she took the dress and unhurriedly slipped it over her head, drinking in her smooth skin and curves and the dark patch between her thighs….

_ Concentrate, dammit!  _ Cassie smacked her cheek to regain some composure, turning her head away.  _ This is the second time I've seen a Guardian naked, and this time it was clearly intentional on her part. Maybe I should set some boundaries? At least about trying to cuddle with me. Nothing wrong with getting dressed in front of other women, right? Nothing to really complain about there.... Besides, I made her a nudist myself. Actions have consequences.  _

"We'll?" Albedo said, interrupting her thoughts, "shall we depart, Cassandra-sama? And, ah, gather information?" The way she said the last phrase, the wink was almost audible. 

Cassie took a deep breath.  _ Focus focus focus... _ . "Y- yes, let's…. [Gate]!" A ten foot black sphere opened in front of her, and seemed to drain away the golden light of the council room. "You first." 

"But naturally," Albedo said, then stepped through.

Albedo's role today was that of bodyguard. Her original role as the guardian of the Throne Room was as tank and support for the members of Ainz Ooal Gown when they made their last stand there, and her dark cleric build was the ideal melee/divine magic counterpart for Cassie's own arcane DPS and buffs. If they ran into any other players while out and about having her nearby would give Cassie the best chances of survival. As such, it was her role to go first.

Cassie waited for ten seconds before following her through. On the other side was forest, sun-dappled and hot in the midday and presumably summer sun. A few feet to the right was the river, flowing forward towards a clearing up ahead that marked the most-upriver farmhouse. The leaf-littered ground was fairly open and flat, so Cassie simply started down along the riverbank, signalling Albedo to follow. 

After a few minutes of leisurely strolling, they passed about fifty metres from the first farmhouse, where the three women they had been watching through the mirror worked their fields. When they saw the newcomers they all paused in their work to stare. Cassie waved, and the younger two who looked like teenagers waved back, but none approached to greet the travellers, so she took the hint and kept walking. 

They passed a half-dozen other houses on their way towards the centre of the village, and the reactions of those who inhabited them were all basically the same non-hostile neutrality. However, even though none actually greeted them, Cassie quickly became aware that villagers were running ahead through the woods around her to announce the arrival of strangers to this isolated place. A quick glance back at Albedo showed her to be nervous and fidgety, ready to jump at the outsiders with tremendous violence only held back by orders from the Supreme One. 

When the two of them finally reached the village proper, a small crowd had gathered to gawk. Cassie halted short of the crowd, feigning shyness, knowing that it would be better to let the villagers come to her on their own terms. 

While she waited for them to do so, she took the opportunity to look them over from up close, in a way the mirror hadn’t really been up to the task of. They were to a one very short; Albedo, and Cassie’s present shape, were both over 180 cm in height, which while not unusual for Yggdrasil was quite tall for real world women, and both towered head and shoulders over every single villager in the crowd before them, none of whom looked taller than 170, and most much shorter. This was clearly the result of malnutrition, for the other signs of it - bowed, rickety legs, distended bellies, and protruding bones from being underweight - were all present in the crowd of a few dozen that sat and stared and whispered at her. 

On top of being malnourished, they were materially poor in every other way, which Cassie had already known but which was immensely worse when seen up close. The children of the village wore nothing but dust, while almost everyone older wore identical ragged brown tunics, cut to the ankles for women and to the knees for men. A few had their tunics dyed a faded blue, though they were nearly brown with age anyway. The huts of the village, which Cassie had written off as log cabins with thatch roofs, were far more primitive, essentially just stick piles topped with straw and sided by mud-caked walls. Most had large holes in their sides obvious even at a quick glance and likely many more that one couldn’t see right away. Farm animals wandered the space between houses untethered, rooting around for food, which contributed to an atrocious smell that hung almost visibly over the village in the warm summer air. 

This was not the poverty of the twenty-first century, nor the rustic village of video games. This was the absolute poverty of real medieval peasants. Who would put this in a video game, where people went to escape their problems and relax? Nothing in Yggdrasil or indeed any other Cassie had ever played or heard of showed real destitution like this, and it was enough to send her first-world stomach twisting itself in knots. 

If Albedo was similarly affected, her impassive face revealed no hint of it. 

Eventually, the crowd quieted, and parted to reveal an old man in a black tunic hobbling forward on a cane. He was short, even by the standards of the village, cut shorter by a hunched posture, with saggy, splotchy skin and vanishingly sparse white hair. Given by the way he was guided by a younger man, possibly a relative, and looked around rather aimlessly, Cassie guessed he was blind or nearly so. 

When he got within spitting distance, the young man stopped him and whispered something in his ear. The old man nodded. “ _ Irrashai Karunee e _ ,” he said in Japanese, with a thin, quiet voice. Welcome to Carne. “My name is Father Arbron. What brings two women alone to our village?”

_ Japanese. I guess that makes sense; Ainz Ooal Gown was on a Japanese server, and I only set Nazarick’s NPCs to speak English manually.  _ “ _ Konnichiwa, Fazaa Aruburon-sama _ . My name is Cassandra, and my companion is Albedo. We’ve….”  _ Shoot! I should have thought of something. I had days to prepare! Stupid! Just be vague, I suppose.  _ “We’ve, um, come from a distant land…. Yes, we’re wanderers, seeking to see the world far from our home.” 

Albedo stared at Cassie disbelievingly for her use of  _ -sama  _ for the priest, as if he were her superior, and looked ready to protest or even strike him down on the spot, but Cassie silenced her with a raised hand. 

Father Arbron smiled brightly at her words. “Travellers from far away, I see! Our homes are open to you, by the ancient right of guests. If you need a place to rest your heads at night, the Temple is always open to the Gods’ visitors, and I would very much love to hear of your journey so far.” 

Cassie breathed a sigh of relief. “We, uh, have already made our camp not too far away, so we’ll be staying there. But I will gladly share my stories with such an accommodating host, Father Arbron-sama.” 

“You honour me, good traveller, but Father Arbron-san is quite sufficient for a man like myself. Now come! Let us share bread and drink, and greet you properly in sight of the Gods. Good folk of Carne, we will hold a feast!” 

“A feast,” Cassie replied. She shot a distressed Albedo her best  _ oh yes that means you too  _ look. 

Much to her credit, the dismayed demon fought her destructive impulse and eventually gave a terse nod in assent. 

And a feast indeed it was. The moment Father Arbron announced a feast in his gentle voice the whole village had stirred itself to a joyous frenzy and went running about to find supplies, leaving him and his guide but the persistent crowd of youth mostly alone with the newcomers. “Ah, pardon my rudeness. This young man is Castor, my grandson. He helps me to carry out my duties as a priest, since my eyes aren’t so good,” he said, waving his hand towards the young man. 

“Hi,” Castor said bluntly. He didn’t introduce himself any further. 

“It’s good to meet you, Castor,” Cassie offered back. 

Castor nodded silently, seemingly uninterested. 

“Cassandra-san and…. Albedo-san, if I remember correctly? Please, come with us to the Temple. I would like to rest, and to speak with you of your travels.” 

“That sounds lovely, yes.” 

Castor touched his grandfather’s arm and began guiding him back towards the village square, leading the way for the guests.

On their way through the dirt paths, Albedo got in close and asked her a question in a controlled, quiet, and decidedly angry voice. “Cassandra-sama! Why do you treat these insects like they are your equals? They should be grovelling before you, and be grateful-” 

“Albedo-san,” Cassandra interrupted, “this is called ‘being incognito.’ Do you not know what it means to be incognito?” 

“No, Cassandra-sama. I apologise! Please, enlighten me so I will not fail again in the future!” 

“You haven’t failed, Albedo. Listen, we are both-” she looked to the priest and his grandson to make sure they weren’t listening, then switched to English, just to be sure “-demons. In Yggdrasil, where we were before, that meant we had targets on our backs. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Cassandra-sama.” 

“Being incognito means  _ they don’t know that we’re demons.  _ For now, by pretending to be two mysterious travellers, we can gather intelligence without suspicion. Or, with minimal suspicion at least; these people do seem rather wary of outsiders.”

“But why? These humans are weak animals. Couldn’t you just control their minds or torture them for-”

“For Christ’s sake, yes, Albedo, I could. It’s not them I’m afraid of. I wasn’t afraid of villagers in Yggdrasil either. If this is anything like Yggdrasil, whatever kingdom or empire this place is a part of will have armies of paladins and clerics and wizards and enemy players who make would short work of us if they caught wind of demons wandering around in the open.”  _ Plus, no torture. Would that even work on NPCs? Maybe it would here, who knows. I remember reading it doesn’t work in real life, but this isn’t real life, is it?  _

_ Is that really the reason I came up with for not  _ torturing  _ NPCs? These are people who could pass even the most sophisticated Turing tests. Torturing them, causing them pain, would be like hurting a real person, at least as far as my own instincts went.  _

Albedo thought on this for a while before answering. “Other players? You mean, other Supreme Beings, such as yourself?” 

“That’s my worry, yes. But those are only the known threats. What if their food is poisonous? What if they have acquired immunity to some kind of disease we don’t, and we bring it back to Nazarick and it kills everyone there? What if there are worse threats than players? This place doesn’t seem to actually be Yggdrasil, and there are too many unknowns for us to do anything rash.”

Albedo pondered for a moment before responding. “I see!” she said, her face lighting up with her characteristic ear-to-ear smile. “In your great wisdom, you have decided to investigate before striking for the glory of Nazarick!” 

“What? No, I- you know what, fine. Yes, I’m waiting before making a move. We’ve reached the Temple anyway, it’s time to speak with the priest and see if we can’t learn about this world.” 


	5. Draft I Chapter 5

Unfortunately, Father Arbron was not terribly helpful, and did not offer much information about the world. 

Not that Cassie had really expected him to, for this was clearly an isolated and uneducated place, but the sheer ignorance he displayed was disheartening. 

“So, you mentioned that you have a king?” 

Cassie, along with Albedo who was looking bored and impatient, basked in the afternoon sun with Father Arbron on a log bench in front of the temple in the centre of Carne, while the people of the village hurried about in the mid-afternoon air to prepare the feast Father Arbron had declared. Castor had delivered his grandfather to the steps, but had long since wandered off to do something else. 

“Yes. His Most Holy Majesty King Ranpos, Gods bless his soul. He has been our King since I was a young man. Who is king in your lands, in this  _ Ka-na-da _ ?”

“Well, we have a Queen, as it happens. But Queen Charlotte doesn’t rule _ ,  _ she’s just a symbol. Canada is actually governed by a grand council called  _ Parliament. _ ” 

“As is right. Ruling is a man’s job.” 

Cassie grit her teeth. “Actually, the Prime Minister is also a woman, as are almost half the members of Parliament.”

Father Arbron’s unseeing eyes twisted with confusion and disapproval. “Hmm. Your Canada is a strange country indeed, to let women rule and wander alone.” 

“Women rule and wander alone in every country, Father Arbron-san. Some countries just make in harder. Anyhow. Tell me, Father, do you know of magic?” 

“Of course. The miracles of the Gods powers of greater priests and sorcerers and witches are common knowledge.” 

“Greater priests? So, you do not have clerical magic?” Clerics of villages in Yggdrasil were almost invariably low-level divine casters, and their powers to cure injuries, diseases, and curses for a small fee was integral to surviving the low levels, at least for human and demihuman players. 

“Alas, I am initiated as a priest, but not Ordained with the Gods’ Blessing. The power of the Gods serves higher purposes than giving the sacraments to villagers or marrying folk to each other.”

“Do you know where I might find priests who can wield magic?”

“I think there’s a few in E-Rantel, some days downriver. The monks in the monastery a week or so north of here might have an ordained priest too.” 

“What can priests do with magic?” 

“They perform miracles, like curing the sick and wounded, creating light in darkness without flame, and perceive evil influence. Does Canada not have priests?” 

“Not like yours, no, but the priests of…. What’s the name of your country?” 

“These lands are called Surisia.” 

“The priests of Surisia sound like those we’ve encountered on our travels.”  _ Quite generic for fantasy, really, and not terribly specific. _ “And you mentioned sorcerers?”

“Sorcerers, yes. Tricksters and thieves, the lot of them. Never trust a vagrant who deals in secrets and speaks in riddles.” 

“Have you ever met one?”

“No, and I hope I never do. Nothing good ever comes of dealing with such charlatans.” 

“Charlatans? Do you mean they can’t actually do magic?” 

“It would be an insult to compare playing with shadows to the miracles of the Gods, but it is real.” 

Cassie didn’t respond, thinking on this for a while.  _ This new world is clearly a fantasy realm like Yggdrasil, which is reassuringly familiar. This place will probably have dungeons and monsters and other tropes of fantasy. This could even be a more realistic incarnation of Yggdrasil, which would be a fascinating place to explore and compare to the original.  _

“So, you mentioned a town where I could find priests?” Cassie said, changing the subject. “Aerindale, was it?” 

“E-Rantel, yes.”

“Is it a big city?” 

“I hear it is quite large, with high walls of stone, but I have never been there.” 

“You said it was downriver? A few days from here?”

“So I have heard, yes. Do you intend to go there?” 

“I believe we will, yes. We have seen few people on our journey, and fewer still large towns, and a break from our travel would be most welcome.” 

“Tell me of it then, if you ever come by here again. I would love to hear about such a wondrous place.” The priest’s unfocused eyes had a wistful look to them. 

_ A place so wondrous? Is a walled town such a wonder to behold? I suppose it would be to someone who’s never strayed far from home, especially a home such as this one.  _

_ What next, then? This man doesn’t know what I need. I doubt any of the rest of these peasants will either. What a pain. Should I ask about his religion maybe, or just keep him occupied until I can leave and head downriver? _

As Cassie debated mentally where to steer the conversation next, the trio on the steps was interrupted by the appearance of a thin girl carrying a small white cloth bundle. She had blonde hair, huge watery blue eyes, and delicate features that put one in mind of a Disney princess. Cassie tried to meet her eye, but the girl shied away, instead looking to the old priest. 

“I brought food, granddad,” she said, prodding Father Arbron on the knee. She had a sweet voice, one that reinforced the Disney princess image. 

“Ah! Enri! Excellent, good girl. Now, don’t be rude! Give it to our guests!”

The girl, Enri, apparently, turned towards Cassie, still refusing to meet her eyes, and bowed a deep and formal bow while presenting the cloth bundle. Cassie took it from her, thanking her graciously. Still not meeting her eyes, Enri then bounced away to rejoin the bustle of the village. 

“Forgive my granddaughter’s rudeness, Cassandra-san,” Father Arbron said. “She’s a bright girl, but she’s young and nervous around strangers. They are rather rare around these parts.” 

“Oh, no worries, Father Arbron-san. I was once young and shy too.” 

The bundle was warm in Cassie’s hands, and smelled of fresh-baked bread. When she opened it, she found that this was indeed what it contained, in the form of three flat unleavened loaves covered in oats, each one one about a foot across. There was another bundle inside, which turned out to contain a handful of coarse-ground salt. 

“Bread and salt is the food even gods share with their guests,” Father Arbron said. “We don’t usually make it fresh, though.” 

“I suppose you don’t usually prepare feasts for random travellers, either?”

“No, not usually. But this is the end of summer, and with the season’s fruits so abundant it is not hard to find an excuse for a feast.” 

Cassie tore off a chunk of bread, and after a quick use of a [Detect Poison] spell that came up negative, she took a bite. It had the texture of a dense, chewy pancake, and tasted of home and holidays and childhood, like a coming inside on a cold day over winter break and knowing that there was going to be a fine dinner shortly. 

Cassie had nothing at all in the last few days, and drunk nothing save the water that first night in the Colosseum, so far having no impulse to eat, and it hadn’t occurred to her just how potent the food in such a realistic world would be. Before she knew what was happening she had stuffed the small chunk she’d torn off wholly into her mouth, swallowed almost without chewing, and tearing off another piece and adding a sprinkle of salt. 

She was unused to this level of detail in video games and was entirely unprepared for how visceral her reaction would be. It was true that Yggdrasil could create flavour, but not very well, and eating in-game only satisfied the [Hungry] condition, not real hunger. This was, as far as her brain was concerned, real food. 

She’d devoured almost the entire first loaf before the dryness of her mouth and throat and the protests of her stomach at the sudden intrusion forced her to slow down. When she looked up, feeling somewhat sheepish at her undignified devouring, colours seemed to stand out to her more, almost like a distant and unfocused camera had suddenly zoomed in. This dream/hallucination/game world was  _ physical.  _ It was  _ bright.  _ It was warm, it was exciting, it was…. overwhelming. Almost real. 

When she looked over to Albedo, who had already been the most visceral detail of this new world, the demon’s disapproving face was suddenly not just a disapproving face but the expression of a whole person. It was an expression she’d seen a thousand times before on the faces of her teenage students, the horrified face of a teen watching an adult to something thoroughly disagreeable and embarrassing, and the sight of it made Cassie laugh out loud with a force and earnesty she hadn’t felt in a long time. “Don’t be rude, Albedo,” she said once she’d calmed down and got her hitched breathing under control, and held out the salt bag and a chunk of bread to her. “I promise it tastes good. Besides, it’s rude to refuse your host.” 

Albedo’s face of disgust became one of repulsion, like that of a germaphobe offered food by a snotty toddler, but she dared not refuse her master’s wishes and so reluctantly took the bread. She took one very small cautious bite, likely her first ever bite of food, chewing ever so slowly and swallowing it like a foul medicine. And yet, a few moments later, she voluntarily took a second bite, and then a third, even reaching for the salt. 

The almighty power of fresh bread lay yet undefeated. 

When finally the feast came, the sun was low above the trees, and the warm summer air was beginning to cool off. Cassie had ceased her attempts to ply Arbron for information directly, and instead simply swapped stories with him about their respective countries while listening for telling details. 

Even then, all she was able to really get was that this village was a deeply superstitious and disturbingly violent place. The old man talked frequently of the Gods, seemingly perceiving the entire world through the lens of the religion; in truth, they had no nation except the Faith. It was a strange worldview to Cassie, so steeped as she was in the 21st-century language of nations and states to think of the world as made of the lands of kings and believers. 

It was also unsettling to hear the casual mention of stoning sinners to death. That kind of thing just didn’t happen in Canada, where even the formal death penalty had been abolished half a century before Cassie was born. 


	6. Draft II Chapter 1

In the mid-twenty-first century, as VR technology grew rapidly in quality, a new type of game took the world by storm: full-dive VR MMOs, typically just called Dive-MMOs or DMMOs. By far the largest and most popular of these games at first was Yggdrasil. Twelve years before the present day, it had emerged as an open-world game overflowing with new places to explore and endless customization. Voice disping and direct nerve-input gear allowed a person to look and sound like virtually anything they wanted, and experience the detailed world with all the senses. The game’s class system allowed players to create nearly infinitely many different builds and playstyles, allowing for a niche for nearly everyone. 

It had once defined the genre, so much so that the imagery of Yggdrasil was still what everyone in every advanced country on earth thought of when they heard the phrase DMMO. 

But its glory days were long passed now. 

Once upon a time, the great guild hall of Ainz Ooal Gown had buzzed with activity, ringing with laughter. Now, there were no more voices; of the forty-two people who had for more than ten years called this place home, only two remained. 

The meeting room of the Great Underground Tomb of Nazarick, the grand hall of Ainz Ooal Gown, was a vast, vaulted, cathedral-like space. From the ceiling hung half a hundred glittering crystal chandeliers, each with its own unique design, casting a warm golden light onto the room below. Surrounded by red marble walls was a large round wood table, itself ringed by forty-two luxurious chairs of diverse design, and in those chairs were two figures seated beside one another. 

The first was wreathed in loose and sumptuous dark robes edged by gold thread, with an elaborate collar made of bone and bronze. Beneath its hood was a pale, fleshless skull; in place of eyes burned two tiny points of scarlet light. 

This creature was an Overlord, a creature mighty even among the mightiest of undead, infamous for their dark necromantic powers. When one was unlucky, one might encounter such a being as a boss fight in a dungeon. 

The other figure, less imposing but no less inhuman, was somewhat smaller, feminine, with blue skin and a pair of small horns that sprouted from the head beneath a mass of silky black hair. The figure’s robes were red and form-fitted, much simpler in design than the other’s, though still edged with gold and silver. The figure’s face and body were covered with gold and gems in the form of many pieces of elaborate jewelry. A long tail sprouted from its backside and curled around one of the chair’s legs. 

This was a Lesser Archfiend, a type of demonic Outsider known for its arcane magics and trickery. Though not as large or physically tough as Greater Archfiends, they were no less powerful, exchanging bodily prowess for magical affinity. 

And yet, these monsters were not true monsters, but rather the avatars of players. 

Players in Yggdrasil could choose between some seven hundred different races and racial variants. These fell into three distinct categories. The first were the humanoids, these being the elves, dwarves, humans, halflings, and their like. These were the most commonly used by Yggdrasil’s player base, since they were mechanically simple and forgiving. 

Second was the demihumans, these being the beast folk, orcs, goblinoids, and others. They enjoyed superior stats to humanoids in certain respects and were thus the most popular races for powergamers. 

The third and final category were the monstrous or heteromorphic races, these being creatures that most games did not allow for player characters, notably demons, undead, slimes, fungal and plant creatures, fae spirits, dragonkin, machines and constructs, and many more. These made up the vast majority of the diversity of playable races, but represented only a small portion of the player base. The Overlord and Lesser Archfiend were among the playable races of this final category. 

It was the Overlord who was speaking. His mouth did move to form words; not because of any technical barrier, for Yggdrasil had no trouble recreating even the most delicate and complex expressions and motions of the face and body, but rather because the creature had no flesh, and thus no vocal cords or lips or tongue. 

“It’s really just like I remember. You’ve done an amazing job of preserving everything, Guild Leader,” it said. Its voice was deep and booming, like a coffin lid slamming in an ancient tomb, yet its tone was gentle, even wistful. 

“That’s what a Guild Leader does,” the Lesser Archfiend replied, her voice smooth and velvety. “Not that I’m much of a Guild Leader anymore, when the guild is just me. Hah. Really, Momonga-san, it’s been too long.” 

“Too long, Alecto-san,” the Overlord, Momonga, said in its booming delivery. “It’s been what, three years now?” 

“Almost four,” said Alecto. “You were one of the first to leave for good. Let me see…. you left because of your job, right?”

“They called it a ‘promotion,’” Momonga said, his crypt-dry voice rich with sarcasm. “I’ve been so overworked these last few years I’ve even needed to see a doctor about it more than once. Frankly, my sense of time is starting to go off.” 

“That sounds terrible.” 

“It is. It pays well, though. What about you? Are you still teaching?” 

“I am.” She taught chemistry and physics at a fancy private school in Sydney, one that mostly catered to the children of rich East and South Asian immigrants. Once upon a time, teaching had been her passion, but in the years since getting the job it had long since become nothing but a way to pay the bills. 

As a condition for entry, every member of Ainz Ooal Gown had to be an adult and a functioning member of society, someone with a job, or at least responsibilities that they took seriously. This ensured that every moment everyone spent online was a moment they fought for and thus valued more than bored teenagers would. Though it limited the absolute amount of time each member could spend in-game, it worked well to keep everyone focused and determined. Jobs and other responsibilities as such were a common topic of conversation amongst the members of the guild, something unusual in the typically escapist world that is gaming. 

“Alecto-san? Do you remember the time that Pereroncino found that cave in Muspelheim?” 

“The one with the flying frost shark?” Alecto snorted0, remembering the story. 

“I never expected it to shoot burning spit like a flamethrower,” Momonga said, chuckling like the rattle of bones. 

“That was such a stupid boss. Great treasure though.” 

The two of them spent the next couple of hours reliving the early days of Ainz Ooal Gown. Momonga and Alecto were among the nine founding members of the guild, when it had started more than eleven years ago. It had started as a small band of heteromorphic players, grouping together for survival. 

Players of monstrous races had unrestricted access to the extraordinary powers and strengths that NPC monsters had, including spell-like abilities, damage and condition immunities and resistances, sky-high base stats, and so forth. Not at first level, typically, for monster races could be and had to be levelled up into more advanced versions; Alecto for example had started as an imp before becoming her present self, while Momonga had started as a basic skeleton. 

To balance this tremendous advantage, monstrous races faced a pair of tremendous disadvantages: the first, that they were considered enemies of the authorities that ruled most cities and major towns, and were thus shut out of the game’s player markets and other infrastructure, rendering them largely unable to acquire resources and equipment through trade; and the second, that heteromorphic players interacted with other players as NPCs, meaning that unlike with normal PvP, player-killing someone of a monstrous race gave XP as if they were an actual monster, and also counted towards tasks that involved killing certain monsters. Heteromorphic players also faced steep XP penalties to counter the ease with which they could take down many types of otherwise challenging enemy, in proportion to the power of their base race, which meant that levelling up was a tremendous struggle in ways for them in ways humanoid players never had to worry about.

The only recourse for heteromorphic players was typically to team up with each other, forming strong guilds as best they could without access to the normal city infrastructure that building a guild base required. Ainz Ooal Gown had started this way, and had gone on to become the single most feared player-killing guild in yggdrasil, despite their small size. 

As the afternoon slowly wound down to evening, the conversation began to slow to a trickle, and eventually Momonga opened the holographic game menu in front of him to check the time. When he saw the hour, he sighed the sigh of wind through a cold cave. “It’s late,” he said. “It’s Sunday. It’s time I logged off, I think.” 

“Well. Thank you for coming, Momonga-san. It was nice to see you again, after so long, especially on the last day. I thought I’d be alone tonight.”

“It was nice to see you too, Alecto-san. I only came back because the game sent an email to say ‘thank you for playing.’ I hadn’t really thought about this game in years until then. Honestly, I didn’t expect to see you either.” 

“Well, I’m the Guildmaster. The captain must go down with the ship, as it were.” 

“You were an excellent Guildmaster, Alecto-san. Maybe we’ll meet again in Yggdrasil II, and have more adventures there.” 

“That would be something…. I haven’t heard anything about a second game, but if there is, I’ll see you there.”

“I look forward to it, Alecto-san! Mmm. It’s time for me to log off now. Again, it’s been good to see you again, old friend.”

“It’s been good to see you too. Goodnight, Momonga-san.” 

“Goodnight, Guildmaster-sama.” 

With that, Momonga vanished into nothing, as if he was never there. 

And Alecto was left alone. 

“I’ll see you there,” she repeated, mimicking his graveyard timbre. 

See you again.

Let’s meet up. 

Catch you later. 

Another game. 

Nice seeing you. 

Every one of her Guildmates had said something to that effect when they departed. One by one over the last four years, they had left, but for Momonga never to return.

She hadn’t even heard from a single one out of game in all that time. 

Was this really the end? Were all her comrades, all her  _ friends,  _ really just acquaintances, coincidentally hanging around the same guildhall? How could they just abandon this guild, the labour of a decade, like it was nothing?

No, that wasn’t fair. Every one of them had been forced to choose between Yggdrasil and real life, and amidst Yggdrasil’s slow decline, they had all eventually chosen real life. Some had stayed on even so, but when six months ago the game’s creators announced it would be ending, even the last stragglers had finally started to vanish. Pereroncino had logged off for the last time the night before; Herohero had gone only that morning. Alecto had thought she’d be alone for the last hours, before Momonga had logged on unexpectedly. 

But Alecto had not yet made that choice. It was true, she had a life outside this game, but what was that life? What in the life of Arisa Morinaga was there to draw her away? She had no family, no lover, no real-world friends, not even any pets. The only thing that existed for her were bills, and the job that paid them. 

_ Is it really all so fake, so flimsy?  _ she wondered.  _ Could my entire world truly fall apart so easily?  _

Apparently it could. 

Alecto was not prone to crying often. In fact, she hadn’t cried in earnest since high school. But now she cried, letting hot tears of ones and zeroes roll down her face. 

The Great Underground Tomb of Nazarick had started as a “natural” dungeon in the plains of Niflheim, the world of ice and mist. Ainz Ooal Gown had discovered it in their early days and decided to test their mettle by advancing within. This was a tremendous risk, for there was almost nothing more dangerous than wandering into an unexplored dungeon in a game where prior knowledge was typically the difference between possible success and certain death. 

And yet, Ainz Ooal Gown, then numbering just fourteen people, had cleared it. Against all odds their skill and wit sheer dumb luck had carried them through to defeating the final boss on their first try. It was a slow and grueling slog; the dungeon was a vast place and one full of peril, but after a week of careful advances they had finally defeated the mighty Jungle Demon tribe that ruled the rainforests of the Sixth Floor, then its deepest reaches. 

Clearing a dungeon on the first try was a feat unparalleled in the history of the entire game and an immense source of pride for the guild, for no one else had ever done such a thing before. As of now, on the very last day, no one had matched it since. 

As a reward, the developers of the game had awarded it to the Ainz Ooal Gown as a Stronghold(++)-Type Guild Base, far and away the largest and strongest in the game’s history, and allowed them to expand the natural dungeon considerably and create numerous high-level boss monsters to guard it. 

Its first three floors were a tomb, vast fields of death and decay full of countless mausoleums, graveyards, fetid swamps, undead forests, and countless many undead monsters. 

The fourth floor was a huge factory complex, an endless maze of traps, robots, rust monsters, mutants, chemical elementals, and radiation hazards. 

The Fifth Floor was a land of permanent winter, with tundra, taiga forest, jagged mountains, and monsters such as various ice spirits, herds of carnivorous reindeer, zombified polar bears, and even Frost Drakes, lesser cousins to dragons. 

The Sixth and largest floor was a vast rainforest packed densely with myriad deadly animals, plants, funguses, plant and fungus creatures, tropical diseases, and even a pair of real dragons. 

The Seventh Floor, the first that Ainz Ooal Gown had created, was a fiery hellscape, a craggy land of volcanic rock and ash inhabited by rock monsters and Fire Salamanders, infested with demons of all sorts.

The Eighth Floor was a windy, barren wasteland, inhabited by the very fiercest monsters that Ainz Ooal Gown had either bought with real-world money or captured and introduced to the dungeon from outside. 

The Ninth and Tenth floors, however, were not the dangerous obstacles of the higher reaches, but rather the actual home base of the guild. 

In the final hours of the game Alecto had decided to take a tour of the home her friends had built. In the enormous vaulted cavern that was the Ninth Floor, Ainz Ooal Gown had created an entire city to supplement the needs of people shut out of the game’s proper market, essentially turning the dungeon into a self-sustaining arcology. Lining the streets were warehouses and shops for every conceivable service or good that one might need, including barbershops, item repair services, magic item shops, ingredient and reagent depots, grocery stores, inns, a fishing tackle shop, a printer, a map store, for maps in Yggdrasil had to be crafted or purchased by players, a flower and gift shop, several restaurants, a huge magical mount stable which held everything from horses and camels to drakes and phoenixes and giant insects and dinosaurs, and even dummy shops for things that didn’t exist in Yggdrasil, such as a drab grey store with boarded windows labelled “Used Car Dealership, Closed Until Further Notice.”

There were forty-two districts in the Ninth Floor city complex, each one designed by a different member of the guild as a place to build their player houses and anything they might want to keep close by. Every one of the city’s districts as such had a different distinct character, ranging from traditional Japanese architecture in the case of Alecto’s own house to the steampunk of KuiinBikutouria’s district or the ancient Greeko-Roman buildings of Ulbert Alain Odle. 

Dearest to Alecto’s heart, however, was the Observatory. Built by Blue Planet, Alecto’s closest friend of all the Guild’s members, she had been an integral part of designing its enchanted telescope, a totally custom-made magic item that could peer directly through the atmosphere and ground of Niflheim and observe the celestial sphere of that world in great detail. Building it was one of her fondest memories of her long service as the guild’s head. She made sure to take a long look at the beautiful stars through its great lens, if just for old times’ sake, on her way by. 

Even absent her friends, the city was not dead and silent. Alecto walked amongst hundreds of creatures that lived here, people of every conceivable size and shape and colour and species attending to their own business like the world wasn’t about to end. 

Of these ordinary citizens, a few stood out from the light crowd. Alecto passed several women and girls in blue-and-white maid uniforms, each one focused intently on some task. Every one of them made sure to bow before her as she passed, even when it was on the opposite side of the street. 

As Alecto approached the end of her final tour, she approached one of the maids. “Good evening,” she said. “Please, raise your head.” 

The maid, a tall blonde girl with big watery blue eyes and tanned skin, faced her Guildmaster as bidden. “What will my Lady have of me?” she said, her voice soft and sweet. 

“Thank you for your hard work,” Alecto said to her.

“Alecto-sama honours me,” the maid replied. She stood there silently then, awaiting further instructions. 

The AIs that animated the NPCs of Nazarick were advanced as video game AIs went, intelligent enough to hold conversations and create surprisingly individual personalities from the relatively simple instructions their makers gave them, though humour that wasn’t pre-programmed dad jokes was mostly lost on them. They made for okay company, all things considered. 

“You may go now,” Alecto said to her after a long pause, giving a small polite bow of her own. There wasn’t really anything else to say. 

“Good night, Alecto-sama,” the girl said, returning to her business. 

She was one of the 42 Homunculus Maids, custom NPCs who served as the personal attendants of the members of Ainz Ooal Gown. Their creation was spearheaded by Whitebrim, a mangaka with a passion for maid outfits. Between him and the many other otakus in the guild, her friends had crafted something like 150 custom NPC maids of one sort or another throughout the tomb. 

As she neared the end of the Ninth Floor’s main road, Alecto checked the ornate gold pocket watch that kept time for her. 12:20 am, it said, its intricate hands and numbers glowing like an old-fashioned radium clock. That meant it was 11:20 in Tokyo, just forty minutes from the end. 

_ Right on time.  _

At the terminus of the long looping lane through the Ninth Floor there was a grand marble staircase that led down towards the Tenth and penultimate floor of Nazarick, which consisted almost wholly of the Throne Room. The stairs were wide enough that ten people could walk down it side-by-side and with arms outstretched and not touch the walls. Plush red carpeting softened the _clop_ _clop clop_ of Alecto’s demonic hooves on the marble as she descended. 

At the bottom of the stairs was the receiving room, a grand parlour with long benches along the sides and a dozen tables with golden tea sets and piles of biscuits and pastries on platters of rare metals and arcane ceramic. 

Standing at the entrance to the receiving room was a tall, stately man with snowy white hair and a white, neatly trimmed beard that surrounded an old and deeply wrinkled face. He wore an old-fashioned black silk suit, with a black bow tie and white gloves. Though he had a generally kindly look about him, something about his intense grey eyes and ramrod-straight posture gave one the impression of a raptor scouting for prey far below. 

His name was Sebas Tian, according to his flavour text the head of all serving staff in Nazarick, and a level 100 custom boss monster designed to guard the Great Underground Tomb. He was one of many max-level creatures with such a purpose. 

Behind him were six maids, though these bore only a passing resemblance to those of the floor above. Their uniforms were full black and glossy, clearly made of no normal fabric, and each one with a different design to suit the skills and personality of the wearer. They were all armed, too: two carried staves, one a pair of spiked gauntlets, another a magical machine gun. 

These were the Pleiades Six Stars, the battle maids who would serve as the last line of defense before the Ainz Ooal Gown made their final stand in the Throne Room of Nazarick. They were not as high level as Sebas, who was made to act as their tank, but were min-maxed heavily for offensive power over defense and thus hit far above their weight. 

Guild bases, in Yggdrasil, ranged from Longhall-type at the low end to Stronghold-type on the high end, from small wooden buildings to grand castles with armies of NPCs to attend to the guild. The number and power of the defending NPCs depended on the type of base: a Fortress-type base for example could support 700 levels of unique monster, these being the boss monsters such as Sebas who had 100 class levels on top of monster level, and an equal number of levels worth of non-unique respawning monsters generically called pop monsters, these being creatures such as the low-level skeletons or crocodiles. The actual numbers of these monsters was determined by how much gold or IRL money the guild was willing to spend on them. 

Nazarick, as a Stronghold(++)-type base, the largest in the history of the game and the only in that class, had far more levels to dole out to its defenders than any other guild base, and because it was a “natural” dungeon, the original inhabitants of all levels were still present and still respawning, and didn’t count against the level totals for custom monsters. 

Alecto almost lost herself in a reverie about the customisation of Nazarick, remembering the long years her guildmates had spent designing every little detail. She was only brought out by her watch, which chimed like a bird to tell her that a mere twenty minutes remained. Alecto shook her head to clear the haze, then looked out towards the defenders of Nazarick’s grand antechamber. 

“Maids, Sebas, to me,” she said. 

All seven of them gave a synchronised bow and approached her. “How may we serve you, Alecto-sama?” Sebas asked on behalf of the group. 

“Accompany me into the throne room.” A demon queen approaching her throne, especially for the last time, should have a retinue. Let those closest to the guild be with it at the very end. 

All seven of them gave another synchronised bow and formed a neat line behind her as she proceeded into the long hallway that led to the throne room. 

The passage was all in complete darkness, which did not impede Alecto’s demonic eyes but would have to be dealt with cautiously by humans and demihumans, who often lacked darkvision. On both sides of the hall, standing like decorative statues, were a number of large humanoid figures, 21 to side for a total of forty-two. 

These were not monsters but constructs called Shadesteel Golems, magic items crafted by players that could be activated to attack and physically impede the progress of opponents coming down the halls. They had high physical offense and defense as well as spell immunity but lacked any special abilities beyond that and didn’t have the adaptive tactical thinking standard for powerful NPCs. Though they made an excellent roadblock on the way to the last stand, and allowed long-distance AOE spells to be hurled by the besieged guildmembers from a position of safety, but were not much of an actual technical challenge for invaders. They were a sort of glossy metallic purple, carved to look like winged gargoyles and so intricately detailed they seemed almost alive. Though invisible to the casual observer, the hall was also set with deadly traps every few feet to further hinder any invader’s progress. 

The doors to the Throne Room of Ainz Ooal Gown were fully ten metres high. They were constructed not of wood or iron or any other mundane material, but rather of scarletite, the very hardest and rarest metal in all Yggdrasil, and was coated paint that glowed with radiation strong enough that only high-level protection spells or items allowed a person to approach without heavy damage and debilitating radiation debuffs rendering them useless or dead, and even then not for long. The radioactive paint would also fleck off into clouds and stick to anything nearby when the doors were rammed, damaging players and equipment. They were, of course, also the focus of literally thousands of defensive spells that had to be peeled back one layer at a time before they could even be attacked with a battering ram, which would also have to be made of scarletite in order to so much as scratch them. 

But Alecto was the leader of the Ainz Ooal Gown, and the towering gates parted peaceably before her on silent hinges. She stepped through them for the last time with great ceremony, savouring the hollow  _ clop  _ each hooffall. 

If the Meeting Room on the Ninth Floor was a cathedral, the Throne Room of the Great Underground Tomb of Nazarick was an indoor stadium. A hundred metres across, forty-two skyscraper-sized marble pillars rose high into the air in two rows, where they met a ceiling made not of stone or earth but rather of water, a glittering pool replete with fish and plants and shorebirds all held in place by a field of inverted gravity. The rainbow lights of the many colourful elephant-sized chandeliers suspended between the water and the floor reflected off the upside-down pool, while fountains pouring upwards from the ground met it near the edges of the room and filled the vast chamber with the gentle white noise and fresh smell of a mountain waterfall. 

Walking into this room never failed to take Alecto’s breath away. 

A plush red carpet ten metres wide and a hundred long covered the blue marble floor along the path to the throne, flanked distantly by the colossal pillars. Alecto took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and began her final journey down the red fabric path. 

Each pillar represented a different member of Ainz Ooal Gown, carved and painted to their desires. As Alecto traversed the great chamber, she recounted in her mind the names of each and every one of her guildmates when she passed their pillars, bidding each one a silent farewell. There was the rich nature photography of Blue Planet-san, the Renaissance paintings of Luci★Fer, the elegant Japanese calligraphy of Warrior Takemikazuchi, the Mesopotamian cuneiform of Tigris Euphrates, the 19th-century brass etchings of KuiinBikutouria, Momonga’s macabre kanji written in bones….

And finally, at the very end of the row on the right, there was Alecto’s own. The pillar was painted blue-black, covered in a sheet of clear precious gemstones that was embedded with millions of tiny glowing beads, producing an image of the stars themselves in tribute to her background in astronomy. It was not so much a pillar as a narrow window into the night sky itself. 

_ Beep beep beep. _

Alecto checked the watch. Just five minutes to midnight now. 

The Throne of Nazarick sat on a raised platform of glossy twisted obsidian against the wall of the cavern. The seat itself was a huge macabre monstrosity of twisted metal and bones, crafted by Ulbert Alain Odle to be the seat of the devil himself. Or herself, in this case, intended as it was for Alecto as Guild Leader. Though none of them were terribly evil or even unkind people, the members of Ainz Ooal Gown often roleplayed the monsters of their avatars. Ulbert had always been at the forefront of this, cultivating this sense of evil in the physical environment of the keep, and thus designed the throne itself to remind everyone in the guild or that role.

It was mostly a formality, though. Important decisions were made by a vote of the whole guild, so her role as leader was mainly as treasurer and meeting organiser. 

Beside the throne stood a woman. She was tall and well-proportioned, with long, lustrous black hair, pale milky skin, and a backless white dress embroidered in silver spiderweb patterns. From the back of her head grey two grey horns, which curved forward to her temples, and from her small of her back sprouted a pair of black raven wings, so dark as to be almost invisible. She wore a pleasant but inscrutable smile beneath her vertically-slitted yellow eyes. 

This was Albedo, Overseer of all the Guardians of Nazarick, an NPC built to serve as a tank for the guild during their last stand. She was a demon, much like Alecto, though a succubus rather than an Archfiend. Albedo was also her favourite the NPC within the Tomb, and something of a longtime low-key crush. 

“Hello Albedo,” she said to the other demon. 

Albedo bowed respectfully. “Good evening, Alecto-sama,” she said, revealing a set of pointy white teeth behind her lips. 

“Thank you, Albedo. Thank you for everything.” 

“You are too kind, Alecto-sama.” Albedo bowed once again, her wings fluttering in what Alecto remembered was a sign of happiness or excitement. 

Looking at the succubus for her last time, a thought occurred to Alecto. She’d always liked Albedo, but she’d never read her backstory, or the personality notes given to her by Tabula Smaragdina, and she would never have another chance.

_ Should I now?  _ she wondered.  _ I won’t get through it all, I don’t think. Tabby was always long-winded, and loved his elaborate backstories quite well. Should I just skim it? Hmm. Yes, might as well; now’s as good a time as any. _

Alecto hopped lightly up the obsidian steps to stand next to her, then made a quick little gesture with her hand that popped open the developer tools, which appeared in the air in front of her like a hologram. She selected the “Background and Personality” tab, and began to read. 

Tabula Smaragdina had indeed given her a most elaborate backstory, some twenty thousand words’ worth, so after about a paragraph Mamori decided to simply skip to the end and see what was there. 

An unpleasant surprise, as it turned out. After a novella’s worth of complex backstory in dense prose, Tabula had written plainly a single sentence:

“Also, Albedo is a dirty slut.” 

_ Really, Tabby? Is that it? That’s what you have to say to your beautiful daughter? I could do better than that.  _

_ I can do better than that.  _

_ Here I am, three minutes to the end. I could tap the text and give her a better story, just like that. Is that really okay though? Tabula put so much work into her. Is it alright for me to change it without his permission? _

_ On the other hand, why would he care? He hasn’t shown up in two years. She was likely still a work-in-progress when he left. Most of the NPCs here are, after all, even the ones I made.  _

_ But what to change it to? I could just get rid of that last sentence, and let the rest stand _ …. _ But then, I could add something nice.  _

_ Ah, yes. I have it now.  _

Alecto jabbed the final line, selecting the text and removing it. A small box and calligraphy brush appeared to allow for handwriting, and she scribbled out the words “Albedo is in love with Alecto.” 

She almost deleted it as soon as it was written, but decided against it.  _ Is this what it’s like to make a waifu? This is embarrassing _ …. _ I think I’ll keep it though. No one will know, and it’s not like anything will come of two minutes of a different Albedo.  _

Alecto swiped the developer tools away, which automatically saved her edits, then turned dramatically and sat herself upon the throne in her best regal pose. 

Despite its imposing appearance, it was a comfortable seat, one covered with furs and cushions that camouflaged into the background metal, and even had lumbar support to help with posture. Not that it really mattered here, of course. 

However, hidden in a pocket dimension within the throne, there was a special item. Alecto reached directly into the material of the twisted chair, passing through the solid-appearing metal like it was air until her hand reached something metallic. She gripped the object, pulling it through into the open to reveal an ornate staff. 

It resembled a caduceus. A long, twisted, central spire wrought in materials more precious than gold was wrapped around by two snakes, in whose mouths were gripped a flying saucer covered in gems. Alecto held it aloft above her and released it, where it continued to float weightless, and admired it for a long moment. 

This was the Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown, and there was nothing that represented the guild and all its hard work like that one object. It was a mighty weapon, custom designed like all Guild Weapons from scratch. For all their great power, most guilds kept their weapons secreted away, deep within the innermost sanctums of their treasuries, since the destruction of a Guild Weapon meant the immediate disbanding of the guild, which included losing control of the guild’s base and treasury, leaving both open to the world.

Alecto had never touched it except to move it from one part of the Nazarick to another, despite the fact that it had been tailor-made to complement her abilities as a combat mage. Even now, in the last hours of the world, she hesitated to reach out and take it. 

The whole guild had spent their nearly every waking moment collecting rare materials and unique items to put together the staff. They’d taken sick days for extra time, fought with their spouses for more hours in the day, and worked for over a year all told to build it. There had been many arguments about the nature and appearance of the staff, but gradually it had taken shape, and in the end was a kerykeion of gold and glittering gems, each of which was a Divine-class item that could produce a variety of functions. 

It was early in the quest to build this weapon that they had first encountered a place then known only as the Shadowy Tomb, a previously undiscovered dungeon that would later be infamous to the world as the Great Underground Tomb of Nazarick, named so after the Elder Jungle Demon who had served as its first boss. 

The Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown was the great symbol of their past glories, a monument to Ozymandias, just like the silent, abandoned halls of Nazarick itself. 

_ Beep beep beep. _

Thirty seconds. 

_ This is it. This is really the end. No more Yggdrasil, no more Ainz Ooal Gown, no more Alecto. I’ll go to bed, wake up to go to work tomorrow, and then come home and go to sleep and then do it all again and that’ll just be my life. No more here. No more me as I am now.  _

Momorin took one final look at the virtual world, drinking in the scene before her - the vast cavern with its ceiling pool, the Staff with its glittering gems and bright gold, the pillars of her guildmates, Albedo in her tight white dress, Sebas and the Pleiades beneath her on the floor - before closing her eyes at T minus ten seconds, counting off the very last moments of this part of her life. 

12:59:50. Ten. 

12:59:51. Nine. 

12:59:52. Eight. 

12:59:53. Seven. 

12:59:54. Six. 

Five. 

Four. 

Three. 

Two. 

One. 

Zero.

Then a pause. 

Nothing happened. 

Alecto opened her eyes, and found the throne room exactly as she had left it. 

_ Why didn’t the game log me out? The end get delayed? No, they would have announced that. Was there a problem pulling the plug?  _

She opened the system menu to check for any announcements, since anything important from the developers was always at the top of the menu as a push notification. 

Or, she tried to, at least. She made the motion used to open the menu, but nothing happened; no menu appeared. Frowning, she traced the familiar pattern once again, to no effect. Then a third time. Still nothing. 

_ What the hell? Did they change the system gesture? No, they wouldn’t do that. They’ve used the same little flick of the hand to open the system console since the beta. They tend to log everyone out for a while when they do updates, and that has conspicuously  _ not  _ happened.  _

She tried opening her in-game menu, and that still worked at least, but it was incomplete: of the three tabs for her Inventory, Spell List, and Skills and Statistics, the last of the three was missing. Her inventory and spell list tabs both seemed to work when she opened them, but as it was her mana and hitpoint totals, skills, and other base statistics were hidden from her. 

She needed to talk to someone about this, and quickly. Even without the system console, she could still use the [Call Moderator] function by simply saying those words out loud. 

“[Call Moderator],” she said. 

No response. Not even the white noise that served as a dial tone in Yggdrasil.

Alecto, feeling a swell of discomfort, gave it a full fifteen seconds before trying again. “[Call Moderator],” she said, slowing down annunciating as clearly as she could. 

Still nothing. 

Discomfort rapidly giving way to actual fear, she tried a different approach, this time casting the [Message] spell, a tool that allowed players of different guilds to communicate over long distances without a common guild chat, or to talk to NPCs who one had some reason to contact. “[Message: Nearest Moderator],” she said, searching for the nearest moderator. 

Nothing. Silence. 

The air was suddenly heavy, as if it was trying to constrict her like a snake. 

Had they all logged out? Were they just not listening? “[Message: Nearest Player],” she said, as her intestines seemed to wring themselves like a washcloth. 

No answer. 

There were no other players anywhere in [Message]’s infinite range. 

There was one more tack she could try, though even now she hesitated to do it. Using the system [Call] function allowed a person to call 000 if for example one’s real body experienced some kind of medical emergency, which would automatically log them out and physically unhook one’s nervous system from the computer, then dialing out with VoIP to contact emergency services. Once a minute, then two, then three went by, leaving the world unchanged, she resolved to do it. “[Call 000],” she said. 

Silence. Nothing. 

_ Even that? What the fuck! Am I really trapped here? This must be a dream, there’s no way this is real, there’s no way this is real-  _

As her hyperventilation diffused into the vast room, she heard a voice, one that cut through her panic like a knife. 

“Alecto-sama?” it said. “Is there something wrong?” 

It was the voice of Albedo. 

“Wha…. huh?” she managed, taking deliberate breaths to calm herself and regain focus. 

“Forgive my intrusion, Alecto-sama, but are you alright?”

_ No, not particularly, thank you very much.  _ “Um, yes, I’m alright, it’s just….” 

Albedo had just asked her a question. Not a complicated one, but nevertheless, that was something no NPC in Yggdrasil had ever done outside quests or cutscenes, not once in Alecto’s decade-long experience. They could carry on conversations when addressed, but never started them. Her expression too was changed, her perpetual smile now replaced by a look of earnest concern. Few NPC faces ever changed, and new 

“‘Just,’ what, Alecto-sama? Is something wrong?” Albedo asked again, insistent. She took a step closer to the throne and leaned in, her huge yellow cat-eyes vivid with concern. 

“GM call function isn’t working,” Alecto replied truthfully. “Someone must have changed the UI.” She didn’t expect Albedo to know anything useful here, for most NPCs displayed no meta-awareness of the game world, but she didn’t exactly have many other options short of venturing out of the Tomb and trying to find a GM or other players or Christ’s sake even a Tutorial NPC and asking them for help. 

“‘GM call function?’” Albedo repeated, her concerned frown deepening. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Please, forgive my failure for not living up to the standards of the Supreme Ones! Nothing would please me better than a chance to make up for my mistake. Please, command me as you see fit.”

Alecto stared at her.  _ Since when was Albedo so _ … _ alive? And why is she acting this obsequiously?  _ “Nevermind. It’s just a type of messaging spell.” 

_ Goddammit. I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s after 1:00 a.m. and I have work tomorrow.  _

Alecto then rose from her seat to start the process of using one of her racial Spell-Like Abilities. However, as she stood, she was immediately distracted by an uncomfortably familiar and deeply out-of-place sensation: the bouncing of her breasts. 

They weren’t supposed to do that. Breasts were just shapes under clothing in Yggdrasil, and had none of the proper dynamics or details of the real thing. Yet a quick peek under her red robes revealed to Alecto that hers were suddenly as real as her true body’s. Indeed, her avatar’s minutes-ago-nonexistent nipples were poking through the thin red silk that covered them. 

_ Huh? What the fuck? Why is this _ ….  _ Why are my _ ….  _ Who the hell programmed this? _

Yggdrasil, like virtually every mass-market game in Japan, had a strict and unyielding policy against R-18 content. Bodies in Yggdrasil as such were hardly more than interestingly-shaped and -coloured plastic store models to which equipment was applied. But looking at herself now, Alecto found that her skin was now the complex rough and smooth of the real thing, with fingerprints and cracks, a pulse, heat, and body hair all over, and even more private details, much to her surprise. A quick glance at Albedo revealed that she too was poking through her dress. 

_ The hell is going on? Is Yggdrasil being rebooted as an h-game? Maybe this is the Yggdrasil II Momonga was talking about. Maybe this is some kind of secret reward for players who stayed on until the last minute. Well, except for the cyber-kidnapping part.  _

As she was investigating, no in a slightly calmer state of panic, a new detail of the world hit her like a brick: its smells. 

Yggdrasil’s olfactory detailing was rich, with different environments having their own characteristic scents, like the dust of crypts or the moss-and-sap smell of forests or the decaying mold of swamps, but that was as nothing now. Alecto’s nose was assaulted by a world of new colours and shapes and textures, and though many were familiar to her from real life but many that she couldn’t place. There was the smell of fish from the water above, alongside those of plants and mud and rot and small animals, the smell of fabric, of rust from the throne, of sweat and bodies. 

She could, with ease, pick out the individual scents of all nine people in the Throne Room. None smelled human; each one was something else, something stranger, even if human-like on top. Most were hard to describe, but there was a sour smell of acid, one like a wet dog’s fur, one like a reptile’s scales, one that smelled vaguely warm and earthy like a fresh-dug hole, another like nothing at all yet with a faint whiff of rot, another vaguely of metal and oil. 

Yet one stood out above all the others. 

Alecto knew without thinking that it was Albedo’s. She was a succubus, after all; she knew well from reading Yggdrasil lore supplements about succubi that they were supposed to be alluring, intoxicating, and irresistible to mortals and even other demons, but until a few moments ago Albedo had only ever smelled mildly of citrus and flowers. Now she could clearly smell sweat and skin oils and others that real humans give off, and much more besides, including a complex and flowery perfume. 

Demons were supposed to have sharper senses than humans, especially having better senses of smell. And now Alecto had such senses. 

_ Is this some kind of hyper-realism upgrade? If it is, I’m impressed. However, I still need to get home; time to head outside and look around manually. Maybe there’ll be some moderator NPCs in a nearby town I can talk to.  _

“[Fly],” she said, with a gesture to activate her spellcasting. Then, “[Perfect Unknowability].” Her body vanished, invisible to all senses magical or otherwise. “[Greater Teleport: Up Top].” 

The world flashed dark for half a second. When light entered her eyes again, she was floating over a hundred metres in the air, where below her lay a the white sandstone mausoleum/fortress that was Nazarick’s exterior. 

The moment she looked beyond the walls Alecto gasped in surprise. Gone were the icy wastes of Niflheim, the cold sharp grass and freezing marshes, the shrouds of mist and distant mountains, replaced by dense evergreen forests. Parted were the clouds that forever shrouded the sunless sky, revealing a dense sea of shining stars. 

And above her, gleaming in the cool night air, were three moons, like nowhere in Yggdrasil. 

Alecto, and all of Nazarick, had been transported to another world. 

For what seemed several minutes, she stared out at the scene, dumbfounded and on the edge of hysterical laughter. Yggdrasil had probably ended at midnight; Nazarick, somehow, for some reason, had been transported to a different and more realistic game, and she was trapped - no, kidnapped - here. 

Wherever here was. 

_ Is this it? Am I just stuck here, waiting until someone reports me missing? Maybe my neighbours will complain about the smell after I shit myself. At this point I doubt that the Dive console will disconnect when I go to sleep like normal, at any rate, so that’ll happen eventually.  _

_ Maybe this is all just an error in the console? I hadn’t considered that before. I wonder if there’s some way I could test that _ …. _ Besides, this seems too huge and comprehensive a change to result from a single glitch, and none of my other games are this realistic, especially not with the smells. I can tell species of tree apart from all the way up here with this nose _ …. __

_Well, if I can’t contact anyone, if I’m in totally unfamiliar territory, then I suppose_ _I’ll have to explore, and look for clues outside. It won’t do for me to do that myself though._

“[Greater Teleport: Throne Room].” 

A moment later she was back in the Throne Room. There, standing just as she had left them, were Albedo, Sebas, and the six battle maids. 

_ Alright, um, what first? This game just got a realism upgrade. I should test just how real the NPCs are. Ah! Yes, I know. They couldn’t leave the Tomb before, and would protest vigorously if one told them to, so that’s probably a good place to start. If I send them out I can kill two birds with one stone too, since I need to look around anyway and it’s not safe to wander unexplored regions alone. For all I know, enemy players could be about to invade the keep as I’m sitting up here all vulnerable.  _

_ That’s assuming there are other players, at least. No one answered my  _ Message  _ after all and there’s no guarantee this happened to anyone else. Oh god, what if I really am the only one here? What if I’m all alone, waiting for someone to unhook me from this nightmare? _

_ No! Don’t think like that, Mamiko. That way lies despair. Keep your head. Think rationally. Look around and don’t go making wild assumptions just yet.  _

_ Right. Well, for starters anyone else trapped here will probably want help to escape too. It would probably be for the best that I try to make peaceful contact first.  _

_ On the other hand, there’s a good chance any player dedicated enough to stay on til the end would have a score with Ainz Ooal Gown, since most players did one way or another, and may refuse to help because of that. Even so, most of them probably also have lives. They’d likely want out more than revenge. _

_ Anyway. On to testing.  _

Alecto dropped her [Perfect Unknowability], becoming visible again to the NPCs. “Sebas, Pleiades,” she said. “Head to the surface and investigate Nazarick’s surroundings out a distance of one kilometre. Move in pairs or groups of three. If you encounter any monsters, do not engage, and if you see any players, flee immediately and seek shelter here. Whatever your progress, return in one hour to report your findings.”

“At once, Alecto-sama!” Sebas said. They all bowed their signature bow, then vanished in a flash of dark violet light as a mage amongst them cast [Teleport]. 

_ Interesting. They can leave the Tomb now. I wonder if that applies to other types of area NPCs?  _

Albedo stared at her in shock. “Alecto-sama! Forgive my arrogance, but what is so dangerous that you would send out the mighty Sebas on simple reconnaissance?”

_ Questioning other NPCs’ orders, or indeed anything but clarifying vague instructions, is new too.  _

“Albedo. Did you feel anything strange happen a few minutes ago?” 

“I…. Don’t believe so, Alecto-sama. I remember only that you arrived and took your place upon your mighty throne.” 

_ Interesting. So she remembers things that happened before midnight.  _ “Do you know where Nazarick is?”

“It is within the plains of Niflheim.” 

_ Damn. It would make things easier, if they knew. Evidently they were not updated along with the game engine.  _ NPCs in Yggdrasil generally acted as if updates or changes didn’t happen, as if the way things were after the update was the way they had always been. If Albedo knew about the change it would at least imply that whatever was going on was planned by the devs rather than something going wrong. As she did not, the latter case seemed more likely true. 

“I’m afraid that’s no longer true,” Alecto said, her mouth twisting. “Nazarick has been transported to somewhere with forests and too many moons to be one of the Nine Realms.” 

Albedo looked quite startled by this revelation. “Transported? To…. another world?”

“Likely so, yes, though I have no idea as to where. Put Nazarick on maximum alert for the next hour, and high alert until I say otherwise. Make sure they know we’re in unknown territory, and to be on guard for anything at all out of the ordinary, then come back here.” 

Albedo bowed sharply. “At once, Alecto-sama!” she said, then without another word vanished in a puff of ethereal smoke. 

_ The Floor Guardians are the first line of defense here. If anything unexpected happens, they’ll be the first to feel it, most likely. It’s important they know what’s going on. They can be like Sebas and the Maids in here too. It seems their memories didn’t get modified by the change, so if anything odd is going on here  _

_ What a mess. I hope I don’t get fired over this.  _

  
  
  
  



	7. Draft II Chapter 2

Once Albedo had vanished, Alecto took off across the Throne Room, retracing the steps she’d taken on the way in. She reexamined the pillars of Ainz Ooal Gown as she went, looking for new details, and indeed found many. The smooth white of the bones of Momonga’s pillar was now rough with pores like real bones, discoloured slightly by the environment, and where the insides were exposed she could see marrow channels that Yggdrasil had never rendered. Luci★Fer’s Renaissance paintings, once just textures on a smooth surface, were now three-dimensional blobs of oil that looked to have been applied with real brushes. Indeed, every pillar was now rich in fine detail no member of Ainz Ooal Gown nor any game developer had ever programmed, and the effect of it all was quite beautiful, if offputting. 

It was not, however, terribly useful to know that. It was not a clue towards solving her kidnapping. 

_ What will be, though? Yggdrasil went out of its way to be immersive. You can’t interact with the outside world much here. While you’re logged in you can’t access the internet, and can’t even get music from your _ ….  _ synched services _ …. 

Alecto opened her inventory and withdrew a small black rectangular crystal implement that greatly resembled an old-fashioned phone. This was how one accessed the music and books and other materials from streaming and download services that partnered with Yggdrasil, a common feature of full-dive VR games, though Yggdrasil didn’t allow anything that wasn’t music or text unlike many other such games that offered the full suite of media. If she were completely cut off from the outside her downloads wouldn’t work. Blessedly, however, they did. Her library was fully intact. 

What that meant was somewhat murky. It suggested whoever was controlling the present situation might have the same partnership with the companies that owned her music as Yggdrasil’s makers did, but music companies were famously loose about who they contracted with, so that could be anyone. It lent itself fairly well to the theory that this was some new edition of Yggdrasil, but the original developers had still been going out of business before she’d logged on last, and did nothing to explain why she was stuck with no way to contact the outside, but still. Baby steps. 

Actually, her guildmates’ music and books should still be around too. Though a crystal let one listen to music remotely, books were only stored as physical objects in the game, typically in player houses, and could be freely read by one’s friends. Players could also listen to each other’s music and podcasts by making use of crystal that worked like vinyl records or CDs. She’d mostly left her friends’ houses alone, even long after they’d left the game for good, but it would be worth checking on their houses to see whether indeed their data was still present. 

In no particular hurry, she made her way back through the long hall towards the Ninth Floor above. She slowed in the antechamber, given pause by the smell of fragrant teas and fresh pastries that now pervaded the room. 

_ Actually, I should try a biscuit,  _ she thought, looking out at the many well-stocked tables of the waiting room. _ Food’s heavily regulated in VR sims of all kinds, so this could be a useful clue if it’s at all changed.  _

She looked around for some particularly tasty-looking biscuits, and upon finding such confections, poured herself some tea, dipped the pastry, and took a bite. The sensation of it was overpowering, especially after years of the bland and textureless foods that were standard to the VR experience. It was a lemon-frosted scone, and every little detail of it was so real and accurate that Alecto found herself momentarily lost in the experience. It was almost enough to make her forget that this was a game to feel the crumb of the biscuit against her tongue, to taste the sharply sour bits of lemon zest in the sweet icing, the moisture of the milky sweet tea as it dissolved the biscuit on her tongue, to feel the mouthful make its way down her throat to her stomach….

This was definitely an illegal sim. The realism food could be programmed with was regulated down to almost nothing in nearly every country on Earth. When food was made to be too real, especially when made to be filling to the mind, it caused people to forego real food in favour of virtual, which made it despite its illegality a popular if dangerous diet tool. Virtual binge-eating and the mental dissonance of starving to death while feasting were at the roots of several mental illnesses unique to the field of VR. This new sim’s food was so real Alecto could easily forget that it was virtual at all if she ignored the too-pointy teeth her demon her tongue kept encountering, easily real enough to put unwary users in danger. 

The confirmation that this was an unregulated sim set her on edge, lending her a renewed sense of urgency.  _ I shouldn’t linger here. If this is really some black-market sim, I could be in more danger inside here than out. Whoever’s running this probably already has my bank data and all my other information too, just to add a psychotic cherry on top of all this.  _

_ Well _ …  _ Shit. What the hell comes next? I’m stuck. I’m just stuck. And probably without any recourse. I’ll just die of thirst in my chair until or even if someone comes to take me out. Maybe when I piss myself I’ll get lucky and it’ll get on the wires and short out my computer.  _

_ But then again, what if my body got kidnapped too? That could explain how this simulation got changed so smoothly on me. In that case, if my apartment was broken into, then I’m truly helpless.  _

With the tired sigh of a middle-aged dad, Alecto took a seat at the table before her, sipping the delicate tea and nibbling biscuits as she pondered. 

What does one do when one is trapped in an illegal simulation? What was one supposed to feel? Alecto could name a dozen or more movies, books, shows, and anime off the top of her head where this exact thing happens. How did the characters react? She couldn’t quite remember. Sure, there was panic. She’d gotten through that, more or less. But in a story it always meant something. There was always some broader plot for the characters to connect their plight to, always some villain. 

What villains were there for her, though? She was a single high school teacher from an insignificant family of Japanese expats. She had almost no money. In fact, the most valuable thing she owned was her top-of-the-line VR gear, and anyone who could program illegal sims like this one certainly owned equal or higher-grade equipment. She didn’t have any connections that she knew of to the Yakuza or Australian mob. Her parents were long dead and left behind little, and she didn’t have any other siblings. She possessed little meaningful to a kidnapper, lacking benefactors, inheritance, or connections. Her school catered to rich kids, but there were easier ways to find out about them than kidnapping a teacher in a simulation. 

Maybe it was all an accident though. That thought was comforting for a moment, but she quickly realised that this might be even worse, since it meant her kidnappers were possibly unaware of plight. 

As she thought about it, this idea started to make more and more sense. She didn’t have much to offer a true cyber-kidnapper, of course it made more sense that whoever was operating these servers simply didn’t know that she was there. Of course, they’d notice eventually. Certainly they would log her off their illegal experiment posthaste then. They might even offer her hush money to not report this to the police. Yes, yes, everything would be done by morning, this embarrassing little accident would be swept under the rug, and she could get on with her life. 

Yet, as the minutes slipped by, she was not booted off the server and back to the white menu room of her VR set. 1:10 am gave way to 1:20, which gave way to 1:30, which in turn gave way to 1:40. Frankly, no computer system that wasn’t deeply compromised would allow some unauthorised high-bandwidth connection to keep up for so long. All that data going back and forth should set off alarms all over the place. But they weren’t, evidently. 

After almost half an hour of drinking tea and eating biscuits at her table, she found herself feeling somewhat ill from the sugar overload. Sitting there and stewing as she waited wasn’t sitting well with her anymore, so she rose to go somewhere else. She didn’t really know where, so she settled on her default location. 

“Greater Teleport: House.” 

The world around her darkened then brightened again. Around her then was a marble-walled room with a floor covered in plush red and blue rugs, on top of which lay a magnificent canopy bed big enough to hold a whole family and soft enough to swallow them all within its downy mattress. On the wall opposite, its light augmenting the glowing magic stones set in the wall, was an ever-burning fire in a richly tiled fireplace. More than a dozen chests of various sizes were staged in the corners and along the walls, and as many or more jewellery boxes adorned the top of the wooden dresser. 

This was Alecto’s bedroom. 

For most players, especially humans and demihumans, having a truly safe place to sleep was of vital importance, and this led to bedrooms to be the most important room in the house. Demons did not sleep, however, so she mostly used this room to store her junk. It was all quite neatly organised, with different containers and sections within those containers all clearly labelled and all of her personal equipment stored in just the right place. This room mostly contained jewellery and other miscellaneous treasures, of which Alecto, a pack rat for treasure if there ever was one, had in prodigious abundance. 

Indeed, she actually spent very little time in her house at all, since her duties as Guildmaster usually kept her elsewhere. The whole place might be better thought of as an elaborate storage shed or warehouse. 

That it was not at all lived in was more apparent now than it had been the last time she’d been here, before the kidnapping. For some reason, the realism upgrade drew the eyes to note the lack of pictures or any other personal identifying features anywhere, and created the impression that this was more of a display house that a real estate agent might show a prospective buyer. As she walked out of the bedroom and towards the front door, Alecto felt a pang of sadness, confronted as she was with her supposedly most personal space and the lack of attention she’d given it over the years. She’d come to her house to escape the queasy feeling that came from too many cookies and ended up adding to it. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
